Pilgrims, Indians — And The Tribe

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

On Thanksgiving, millions of Jews all over the United States will sit down to a highly ritualized meal, enjoy the company of relatives and friends, and give thanks for the blessings of liberty. But can we celebrate Turkey Day as a Jewish holiday?

Jewish food maven Joan Nathan says no. She sees Thanksgiving as a “purely American holiday with the Jewish sensibility of lots of food!” She is preparing turkey with chestnut stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, cranberry sauce with sugar and a whole orange and pumpkin roulade with ginger butter cream.

Other chefs, however, view Thanksgiving in unapologetically Jewish terms. Linda Burghardt, author of “Jewish Holiday Traditions” (Kensington), sees Thanksgiving as a continuation of Sukkot and the other fall Jewish holidays.

“We relate it to Sukkot by eating a lot of stuffed foods, like stuffed cabbage,” she said. “Fillings are very important, and the feeling of abundance.” The Burghardts, who live in Great Neck, L.I., eat apple strudel (stuffed, of course, with chopped walnuts) for Thanksgiving dessert.

“America saved my parents from the Holocaust,” said Burghardt. “For me, Thanksgiving has a lot of layers and reverberations. My Jewish and American identities are intertwined.”

Susie Fishbein, author of the popular “Kosher by Design” series, also sees the underlying Jewishness of Thanksgiving. She points out that Jewish law mandates Hakarat Hatov, the recognition that someone has done something good or kind for you.

“Why wouldn’t Jews want to take a moment to recognize what wonderful opportunities we have been given both as Jews and as Americans?” she asks. It is in this spirit that the Orthodox Union asks congregations to arrange for a meal to be delivered to a local police or fire station on Thanksgiving to display gratitude for the protection that Jews enjoy.

Fishbein will miss Thankgiving this year since she will be on a plane back from Israel, where she is doing a week-long “culinary spa” with Jews who have made aliyah from all over the world. So she has taught her 9-year-old daughter how to tie up the turkey and make glaze. In her absence, her family will prepare sweet potato soup with maple glazed pecans, spinach salad with creamy parsnips, beef roulade with red wine sauce, balsamic onion gravy, pumpkin muffins and a trio of mini desserts — peanut butter mousse, warm runny chocolate soufflé and mini cinnamon buns.

For Orthodox Jews, who do not drive on Jewish holidays, Thanksgiving provides an opportunity to celebrate with friends as well as family, Fishbein pointed out. “You can do Thanksgiving with friends, because people can drive,” she said. “On Jewish holidays, you can only really celebrate with family, because it’s hard to put friends up for three nights in a row.”

Fishbein recalled celebrating Thanksgiving with her siblings and all their young children by watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from the ledge outside a bank on Fifth Avenue where her father worked. The family would then meet her grandmother at a kosher delicatessen for open-faced hot turkey sandwiches. “It was a lot less about the food, and more about family togetherness and watching the parade,” she said.

For Jeff Nathan, owner of Abigael’s on Broadway, Thanksgiving is a perfect time for Jews to eat out. Nathan does two or three seatings every year for the holiday. On the menu this year: turkey with sourdough-wild mushroom sage stuffing, butternut squash soup, salad with toasted pecans and apple, cranberry orange compote, candied sweet potatoes, warm apple cobbler and maple pecan torte. (For those who prefer beef, he offers grilled rib-eye steak, for a higher price.)

“How often do you put turkey, gravy and stuffing together?” he asks. “I always promise myself that I’ll eat this stuff more

often, but I don’t get around to it until the next Thanksgiving rolls around.” He said that he especially looks forward to the Shabbat lunch after Thanksgiving, when he devours cold turkey sandwiches with cranberry mayonnaise and arugula on whole-grain bread.

Many Orthodox Jews do not celebrate Thanksgiving at all, on the grounds that celebrating a non-Jewish holiday is akin to Avoda Zara, idol worship. On the other hand, a group of Conservative rabbis recently invented a seder-type service for Thanksgiving, beginning with the recitation of Psalm 100, which urges the entering of the Lord’s gates with thanksgiving. The service ends, naturally, with the ultimate Jewish prayer of thanksgiving: the Grace After Meals.

In Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, “Avalon,” an immigrant Jewish family in Baltimore gathers every year for Thanksgiving; it is the carving of the turkey, rather than the lifting of the shank bone or the lighting of the menorah, that is their most important family ritual.

Indeed, the holiday’s very “affirmation of family,” Gary Gerstle has written, “may have accounted for the rapidity with which Catholic and Jewish ethnic households in twentieth-century America absorbed into their social calendar a holiday honoring a strange group of seventeenth-century Protestant zealots.” Or was it that Jews simply couldn’t resist a holiday that is celebrated mostly through eating?

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization

Jerusalem Hotel

Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem