How Is Your Financial Health?
The Beholder’s Eye by Doug Brook
A Trip to Thanksnutevka
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As a child of the 1980s, the first time I saw the film “Fiddler on the Roof ” I had the same awestruck reaction as many of my Jewish peers: “Hey, that’s Dr. Zarkov from Flash Gordon!” Suddenly, to a generation raised on Star Wars and Star Trek, or — as my mother put it — Star Garbage, Judaism was just a little more cool. But before regaling you with tales of Tevye, Sholem Aleichem, or fiddlers on hot tin roofs, first a brief explanation why this column is contradicting the popular demand from nearly a couple of you, by declining to provide the ultimate comedic take on Thanksnukah. Why decline? Too many reasons. First of all, half of the free world has already written about Thanksnukah, or at least invested time in trying to determine how to spell it. And that’s the first problem: There’s widespread disagreement about what to even call it, let alone how to spell it. It makes spelling Hanukkah seem as easy as drinking Manischewitz. You want a A simple stroll around the Internet clearly shows two things. One, Thanksgivukkah there are many supplements available column? Like to enlarge or reduce whatever you might want enlarged or reduced. And there haven’t been you know you can trust them because 40-zillion of them their makers were too focused and efalready? ficient to get bogged down in things like the FDA approval process. Two, the Internet clearly shows that there’s Thanksgivukkah, Thanksgivenukkah, Thanksnukah, Thanksnukkah, and many others that will make the Spellchecker crawl out of my Mac in disgust. Of course, Thanksnukah is so obviously the best choice, that this column will spare both of you readers from any wasting of words to further justify this obviousnessitude. Those wasted words would have delayed reading about the other reasons to avoid covering Thanksnukah, such as how millions of Jews will be disappointed when they realize that this portmanteau will eliminate one late-year food holiday from 2013. Hanukkah itself is already a holiday of Thanksgiving. The combination of them makes all the more glaring the general lack of awareness of this actual meaning of Hanukkah, thus putting off scholars from their latkes even more than making them from sweet potatoes will. Further, modern society being what it is — with these kids these days and their rock-n-roll — it can’t afford any concatenation or reduction of celebrations of gratitude. The world needs all it can get. Speaking of concatenation, someone in this great nation will eventually recall that the official animal of Thanksgiving is the turkey, and the animal of choice for Hanukkah is the elephant. No attempt at combining them ends well. Imagine religious school teachers describing the Maccabeean battlefields filled with turkephants. If Cole Porter were alive to see this, he’d have to write of the pilgrims, “’stead of landing on Plymouth Rock, a turkephant would land on them.”
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November 2013
Southern Jewish Life