December 14, 2022

Being a road comic I’ve probably stayed in more hotels than Conrad and Paris Hilton combined. Well, maybe not Paris. 

I’ve stayed in some of the best and the worst. 

In Ottawa, I stayed in the Eastview Motel. I checked in on an ice-cold snowy afternoon. The lobby door was missing. Someone had kicked it in.  At the reservation desk was a guy wearing a parka, mittens, and a Muskrat Shearling trapper hat. 

Another winner, instead of cotton towels they had disposable three-foot-long brown paper towels to dry off with after a shower. 

In Dallas, when I asked for someone to come clean my room they said the woman that was supposed to clean it stabbed someone and they were short-staffed. Glad I never asked her for extra shampoo. 

My favorite was when I entered my hotel room I saw a guy sitting on the toilet. Quite nonchalantly he said, “I’ll be done in a minute.”

Then there are the good ones. At a Ritz, the manager greeted me at my car then handed me my keys then escorted me to my room. Some places leave expensive chocolates on your pillow. Tiny lavender atomizer sprays for the sheets.  Nice, but far less memorable than an electrician on my toilet. 

But recently I stayed in a place the likes I’ve never stayed before. A place where there was a blossoming love story. I spent a glorious Shabbat with my newly married son Noah and daughter-in-law Chloe in their Manhattan apartment. 

Usually, when I’m leaving town my wife kisses me and says I love you. Occasionally she’ll toss in be safe. This time she said, “no throwing towels on the floor, and easy with the passing gas.” You’d think she was sending an orangutan. 

She then reminded me even though these were our kids I was a guest in their home. And even though they made me feel totally comfortable I never forgot I was a guest. 

They even bought bananas for me. My wife must have told them she was sending an Orangutan.

The funny thing is our three boys lived with us for about 20 years and never once acted like they were guests. Sometimes they acted like it was their house and we were encroaching on them. There was even a 15-year run where we gave them an allowance every week for eating all our food. 

So here I am in their Upper East Side apartment spending Shabbat with them. Friday night Chloe’s parents joined us for dinner. On the table were two homemade loaves of challah she baked. It was just the five of us singing, talking, and a bisl Torah. Enjoying Shabbat and each other’s company. It was beautiful.

I recommend that if you can, spend a few days living with your married kids. It’s a real eye opener. You get to see closeup how they do their relationship. 

I recommend that if you can, spend a few days living with your married kids. It’s a real eye opener. You get to see closeup how they do their relationship. And though there are similarities in many relationships, every relationship has a uniqueness all their own.  I’ve always brought Shabbat flowers, every week. My son Noah brings his wife flowers. I guess I did something right. Eventually I had to realize that not me but my wife runs our home. And does a masterful job. Noah seems to understand he also has to step it up and at times step aside. 

But what really impressed me most was how much they seemed to really like and love each other. It was a fantastic thing to see. To watch your kids doing well and happily married gives you a great sense of well-being and naches. It’s truly a breath of fresh air. 

Yes, we dressed and schooled them. Taught them some manners and hopefully implanted some morals. Then with any luck sent some nice people into the world. 

No matter how much we’ve done for them, they ultimately spotted the diamond in each other. They are the ones that locked eyes and saw through into each other’s hearts. 

When I was checking out and thanking them for having me as a guest I said, “you’re both going to be very sorry that you treated me so well.” 

They smiled and said “anytime.” Then gave me a banana for the plane ride home.

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Mark Schiff is a comedian, actor and writer, and host of the ‘You Don’t Know Schiff’ podcast.

For almost a half century, the U.S. Naval Observatory has served as the official residence for the nation’s vice presidents and their families. But this may be the first time in which the most prominent and impactful political luminary in the family was not the nation’s second ranking elected official but rather the vice presidential spouse. 

In the past, figures such as Tipper Gore and Lynn Cheney created controversies while their husbands served in the VP job. But Douglas Emhoff’s star turn as the leader of last week’s White House roundtable on antisemitism was an unprecedented role for which America’s second gentleman deserves immense credit and enthusiastic applause. Emhoff’s success in convening the historic gathering and establishing himself as one of the most important national figures in the fight against anti-Jewish hatred stands in stark contrast to the struggles that his spouse has faced during her first two years in office. 

Kamala Harris stumbled early in her term during a high-stakes trip to Central America to address immigration policy, and many Washington observers believe that she has yet to regain her political footing. Democratic strategists worry openly about whether she could be an effective party standard-bearer if Biden were to choose not to seek reelection.

But while Harris has contributed to her problems with recurring verbal mishaps, in fairness many of her difficulties are due to circumstances beyond her control. Her first two assignments from the Biden White House were the no-win jobs of solving a worsening immigration crisis and of passing a partisan voting rights bill in a 50-50 Senate. (The president’s staff has also seemed very comfortable leaking what they see as Harris’ inadequacies to journalists covering her office.)

Broader forces and long-standing Washington customs are also conspiring against Harris. For most of the modern political era, the American people have tended to select outsiders and relative newcomers as their presidents. Donald Trump’s lack of political experience was an extreme example, but Governors Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all ran on pledges to change Washington, as did first-term Senator Barack Obama. 

In order to reassure voters that they would be able to govern effectively if elected, each of these outsider candidates turned to more established political leaders to serve as their running mates. Former Senators Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney all provided longer-term perspective to the new presidents, and the concept of a “wise old hand” as vice president became conventional wisdom in the nation’s capital.

Before Biden’s election in 2020, the only exception to this trend was Bush the elder, who, like Biden, had served eight years as vice president before winning the Oval Office. Neither Bush nor Biden needed someone with more experience than their own, and so both balanced their respective tickets by selecting a young up-and-comer to represent their party’s next generation of leadership.

Dan Quayle was a young conservative Senator from Indiana, who while largely unknown by the voting public outside of his own state, had gained respect on Capitol Hill for his knowledge of national defense policy. But since Bush had no need for a vice president to advise him on the ways of Washington, Quayle was quickly marginalized and ended up as ongoing target of disparaging jokes on late night television. When he ran for president a few years later, he made little impact as a second-tier candidate and dropped out of the race after the first few primaries.

Like Bush, Biden did not require a vice president to help him understand the federal government. And so like Quayle, Harris has struggled to find a useful role in this administration. Biden appears likely to seek a second term, which gives Harris ample time to find a role and voice in her office with which she is more comfortable. But at the midway point of the Biden-Harris ticket’s term in office, it is clearly Emhoff who has emerged as the most impressive member of the VP family on the national political stage.

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Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. Join Dan for his weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” (www.lawac.org) on Tuesdays at 5 PM.

In December of 2020, after Joe Biden won the presidency and while the Biden transition team was settling into the executive branch, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff recorded a short video wishing Jewish Americans a happy Hanukkah. It is a common gesture of politicians, corporations and various brands to release a statement around this time of year to show support for their Jewish constituents, consumers and followers. Unfortunately, this particular statement by Harris and Emhoff illustrated everything that I believe to be wrong with Hanukkah messages, although one can hardly blame the two of them for what most likely amounted to a communications error. “I love Hanukkah because to me, it is really about the light,” said Harris. “It is about bringing light where there is darkness. And there is so much work to be done in the world to bring light. And it [Hanukkah] is a celebration of, always, Tikkun Olam, which is about fighting for justice and the dignity of all people,” she continued. Emhoff then added: “And it’s about joy.”  

These words, to put it bluntly, have nothing to do with Hanukkah, but rather express sentiments typically characteristic of Christmas. Unbeknownst to them, Harris and Emhoff have contributed to the Christmasfication of a Jewish holiday, using the season to lump Jewish Americans into universalist messages of love and light and happiness and quality time with family. 

I have written before about the trend of stripping Hanukkah of its meaning to make the holiday more palatable to the non-Jewish majority, especially as it manifests commercially in the U.S. — with blue and yellow decorations in the CVS Pharmacy and advertisements on television where snowflakes blow over a menorah (with an inaccurate number of candles) and a new Chevrolet that can be yours for a fabulous price. But I had no idea how entrenched this phenomenon was until I immigrated to Israel this year and heard for the first time that Israeli children do not receive eight presents for each day of Hanukkah. “Why would we get presents?” my friend asked me while I stood stupefied in our local Tel Aviv coffee shop. “You Americans do that, so you don’t feel left out of Christmas.” I felt like the breath had been knocked out of me. My favorite time of year in childhood was formed not by connection to Jewish identity as I had assumed but by the winds of assimilation —the very winds that the story of Hanukkah warns against. It remains ironic that millions of American Jews have reformed Hanukkah to be more in line with the values of their society, when the meaning of Hanukkah is to resist such temptation whatever the cost.

The theme of Hanukkah is the resilience of the Jewish people against the forces that sought to annihilate us.

The theme of Hanukkah is the resilience of the Jewish people against the forces that sought to annihilate us. However, unlike Purim, when we celebrate the miracle of being saved from an imminent genocide, during Hanukkah we commemorate being saved from spiritual oblivion, when our identity was threatened not by the sword but by the enlightened Hellenized Greeks who worked to change Jewish ideas. The Greeks occupying Judea did not adhere to a vicious ideology that demanded dead Jews. Rather, as novelist Dara Horn writes in her essay in Tablet Magazine, “The Cool Kids,” the antisemitism of the Greeks was insidious — it sought to kill Jewish civilization by way of placing statues of Zeus in the holy temples, by placing social pressure on young Jewish athletes resulting in them reversing their circumcisions, and by enticing the entire land out of its archaic monotheistic practices that were obnoxiously old-fashioned. Judah Maccabee and his band of zealots rebelled against not only foreign rule but also against the erosion of Jewishness in the Holy Land and subsequently  of their sovereignty as Jews, which yes, included rebelling against other Jews who had taken the Greeks’ bait.  

Horn connects the story of Hanukkah to the story of Jews, even the most loyal communist Jews, who lived in the Soviet Union. “In 1918, the Soviets created an entire branch of their government solely for cool Jews (the Yevsektsiya) whose paid job it was to persecute uncool Jews,” Horn writes. The “uncool” Jews in this era were the Jews who refused to accept the principles of socialism, which emphasized hegemony, internationalism, and the chipping away of all religious observance. “Yevsektsiya-style antisemitism, or Hanukkah style antisemitism, always promises the Jews a kind of nobility,” Horn continues, “offering them the opportunity to cleanse themselves of whatever the people around them happen to find revolting. The Jewish traits designated as repulsive vary by country and time period, but they invariably contradict the specific values that the surrounding culture has embraced as universal.”

What we are meant to contemplate during Hanukkah is Jewish particularism and our unique culture and traditions, not our obligations to mankind. 

If art and poetry that praised Athena rather than Hashem was all the rage in antiquity, if Marxism was all the rage in the twentieth century, then today the hottest commodities are human rights, secularism and social justice — the values that Harris and Emhoff endorsed in their Hanukkah message and the values the majority of Americans associate with Hanukkah. Please do not be mistaken — these are all things that I, and many Jews, value wholeheartedly. But they could not be more at odds with what we are meant to contemplate during Hanukkah: Jewish particularism and our unique culture and traditions, not our obligations to mankind. 

Theodor Herzl, the architect of the modern State of Israel, was at one point the poster child for a Hellenized Jew. There was no Jew more westernized, more modern, or “cooler” (in Dara Horn’s terminology) than Herzl. In fact, he was known to erect a Christmas tree in his living room during the holiday season, and his infamous initial solution to the Jewish question was a mass conversion to Christianity to evade the scourge of antisemitism. Yet fortunately for future generations of Jews, Herzl eventually realized that antisemitism could not be evaded even with the most intense stripping of identity. Members of the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union discovered this as well when they were eventually purged from the Communist Party and thrown into gulags.  

During his grand recognizance of reality, Herzl authored an essay entitled “The Menorah,” which begins with:

“Once there was a man who deep in his soul felt the need to be a Jew … He had long ceased to trouble his head about his Jewish origin or the faith of his fathers when the age-old hatred re-asserted itself under a fashionable slogan. Like many others, our man, too, believed that this movement would soon subside. But instead of getting better, it got worse. Although he was not personally affected by them, the attacks pained him anew each time. Gradually his soul became one bleeding wound.”

Herzl then proceeds to wax poetically on the meaning the lighted menorah bears for him and his children during a time of increased anxiety in Europe. Its flames, as Kamala Harris mentioned during her Hanukkah message, inspire reflections on light. “No office is as blessed as the servant of light,” Herzl concludes, except his interpretation of light pertains to the resurrection and rededication of Jewish identity, in himself and in others, and to fighting antisemitism. In other words, Herzl did not send the Jews who were reading his work a Christmas card. Evading such tropes allowed him to lay the foundation of the world’s only Jewish state. 

This holiday season, during yet another time of rising anxiety in the Diaspora, I would implore all politicians, corporations and brands to rethink their repurposed Christmas messages. If it is your earnest desire to wish Jews a Happy Hanukkah, then please, cancel your glowing remarks about love and friendship. Instead, express your solidarity with the Jewish people against our enemies, whether they are outright violent in their hatred of Jews or more subliminal. Tell us how you admire not only the Maccabees but also all Jews since who have championed self-defense and self-preservation. This is how true allies wish good will, allies who not only recognize our history but understand its contemporary implications as well.

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Blake Flayton is the New Media Director and Columnist for the Jewish Journal. 

On December 14, TMZ reported that Stephen “tWitch” Boss, a famous dancer and DJ, had committed suicide. He was talented, he had a beautiful family and amazing career and he was only 40 years old. He left behind a wife and three children.

The news was absolutely heartbreaking. I always enjoyed watching videos of Stephen and his lovely wife, Allison Holker, dancing together. They seemed so happy.

But that’s the thing about depression, which I assume Boss suffered from: it’s typically not visible. We think that just because somebody “has it all,” they aren’t prone to mental health issues. Sometimes, the exact opposite is true. Since they are famous or rich or prominent, there is more pressure on them and they feel more alone.

Throughout my entire life, I’ve battled depression. In my freshman year of high school, it got so bad that I attempted to overdose on Ibuprofen and I was sent to the ER for threatening to kill myself.

I fought my depression, taking antidepressants at certain times of my life, going to therapy and becoming more spiritual. Today, I surround myself with incredible people, do what I love and know what my triggers are and how to avoid them.

It took a lot of hard work and, even though I’m generally a happy person, my depression still pops up every now and again. I’ve used the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 my fair share of times when my therapist wasn’t available and I was in the throes of a very bad panic attack – especially after I had my second child this past year and was experiencing terrible post-partum depression. On the outside, I seemed fine, but I wasn’t at all.

You may not know that people are depressed because they don’t want to feel like they’re burdening their friends and family with it. Everyone seems like they’re always busy, even if that isn’t true. Everyone has something going on. Who has time to talk? Who will listen? Therapy is a huge help, but you can’t go to therapy 24/7.

There is also the expectation to lead a perfectly curated life on social media, to look happy even when you aren’t. On Instagram, Stephen Boss seemed content. Who would have known he was going through depression? That probably made him feel even more isolated.

Unfortunately, antidepressants are not a cure-all, either. I’ve been on antidepressants that made me suicidal. You need the right doctor who actually listens to you and doesn’t just write you a script for any drug. And, of course, you need to know yourself and be able to spot shifts in your mood.

My spirituality is what I often rely on when I’m depressed. I think about what I’m grateful for. If I’m having a bad day, and nothing is going my way, at least I can breathe. At least I woke up that morning. Then, once I’m grateful to be alive, I start to realize there are many other ways in which I’m blessed. It helps to make a list.

In my darkest moments, I ponder what my life will look like the next day or the next week or the next year. What if I don’t feel so bad tomorrow? What if things get better? Looking back at my life, there is plenty of proof that there was always something good on the horizon. All I had to do was survive the tough times.

If you are struggling with depression, I urge you to get professional help. Talk to your loved ones and talk to God. Go to a community dinner at your local Chabad for Shabbat so you aren’t alone. Take a walk outside and enjoy some beautiful nature.

You should not be suffering. Nobody should be suffering or think that suicide is the answer, because it’s not. God did not make a mistake when He created you. There are no extra souls. The world needs you.

I wish that poor Stephen Boss, may he rest in peace, would have realized that. But for others, it’s not too late.

Take a look around, and realize that you are worthy, you are valuable and you are surrounded by love.

Want to talk? Email me at Kylieol@JewishJournal.com.

If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

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Kylie Ora Lobell is the Community Editor at the Jewish Journal.