Why My Jewish Family Celebrates Christmas: It Might Not Be What You Think

Lester Eugene Denonn walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to work every day as a business and finance attorney on Wall Street. He never learned to drive. Notably bald, his passion was academic philosophy: epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of law, philosophy of religion, and especially Bertrand Russell. Lester was the most positive physical manifestation of the term egghead.

If I could meet a deceased ancestor, it would be my great-grandfather Lester Denonn. When I collected books at a young age, majored in philosophy, and made Phi Beta Kappa, my mom and her sister compared me to their grandfather.

Religion is the context in which Lester most frequently comes up in my family’s conversation. In elementary school, I was “half Christmas, half Chanukah.” But unlike my fiancé whose dad was raised Catholic and mom was raised Jewish, I have two Jewish parents, at least ancestrally. Eventually, I started explaining, “my dad is Jewish, and my mom is of Jewish heritage. My mom’s dad was Jewish, but left them, and my mom’s mom was of Jewish heritage. But my mom’s maternal grandfather was a philosopher who didn’t believe in religion, so they celebrated Christmas.” That doesn’t exactly flow right off the tongue.

How did being an ethnically Jewish philosopher in early twentieth-century Brooklyn signal celebrating Christmas? He died in 1985, and his wife of almost 60 years, Bess, donated Lester’s papers to the Bertrand Russell Archive at McMaster University in Canada. His non-Russell papers remain in my parents’ basement, so while home for Christmas, I decided to take a look.

With the excitement of a graduate student who can finally drink water beside archival materials, I had so many questions. How did Lester and Bess start to celebrate Christmas? Why, and what does that mean for modern American Jewish history? Was Lester simply an atheist philosopher, if that can ever be simple, or did he and Bess aspire toward a social status that being Jewish would not allow?

How is it that Christianity can be construed as secular, even by a militant atheist? What is secularism in America, and how does it relate to ritual practice in a way that Christmas is acceptable?

In the 1920s, Lester graduated with honors in philosophy from New York University, earned a master’s in philosophy from Cornell University, and married Bess. Then, instead of a doctorate in philosophy, he started law school. Maybe he wanted to earn more money to support his new bride. After all, working for a Wall Street law firm is more lucrative than becoming a philosophy professor. Lester cowrote the Uniform Commercial Code, and his books and articles shaped his field.

But in his spare time, he wrote for the New York Times Sunday Book Magazine and reviewed hundreds of books for the American Bar Association Journal. One of his papers in our basement stated that “despite a very busy law practice, he pursued as a hobby his love of philosophy which resulted in his extensive reading in the books of his personal library of 7000 volumes, among which is his Bertrand Russell Library… perhaps the largest private Russell library in the country.” From 1943 through 1982, he was the official bibliographer of Bertrand Russell, according to the Library of Living Philosophers.

In one leaflet with Bertrand Russell’s face on it, Lester provided examples of Russell in debate. Reportedly, Russell was a prominent critic of Marxism. The USSR philosophical dictionary called Russell “reactionary and militant ideologue of Anglo-American imperialism,” as cited in Simirenko’s Social Thought in the Soviet Union. Regarding the debate on the “existence of god,” Lester referenced a transcript included in Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian. This same paper explained that Bertrand Russell identified as an agnostic – “Russell does not contend that there is no God, but that we do not know that there is” – but my mom always remembered that Lester Denonn was an atheist. While researching, I felt less interested in why Russell was not a Christian, but more interested in why wasn’t my great-grandfather Jewish?

I inched closer, studying a headline, “Lester E. Denonn At Forum to Tell of Bertrand Russell” from the Brooklyn Heights Presson November 21, 1951. He spoke at the Brooklyn Heights Open Forum, located at the First Presbyterian Church Assembly Room, about his recent publication The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell. Leaning against the entire column, an adjacent headline stated, “B’nai Brith Lodge Meeting Tonight,” specifying, “All Jewish men living on the Heights who are not members of B’nai Brith are urged to communicate with Mr. Blackman.” Lester was disinterested in the latter.

Around this time, my mom entered the basement and added key details. Lester’s mother Rosa Schulhafer immigrated from Germany, and his father was born in Brooklyn Heights. Lester was born in 1901. When my mom knew him, Lester did not acknowledge his Jewish heritage at all. She claims that he was anti-ritual. At this point, I had been researching for a few hours. So, it was ironic that my mom found the folder for which I’d been looking almost as soon as she entered the room.

“Wow, he was very against Judaism,” she observed. In the folder titled “Judaism,” the first paper was titled Aspects of Progressive Jewish Thought. Here were Lester’s notes on Essays in Honor of Rabbi Leo Baek’s 80^thBirthday in May 1953. Nowhere did the document specify who wrote it, but my mom insisted that these were Lester’s views and his words. After all, she knew him. Now that I’ve read them, the notes do indeed seem to match Lester’s writing style.

I would’ve assumed without context that these notes were penned by an opponent of Judaism, not the son and grandson of Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. Lester wrote: “They point to the conflict between Reform and Zionism. I am attracted to neither. Again, good slams at the stupid pageantry of Bar-Mitzvahs… The Chosen people notion is to me egotistic bosh.” Thus, he was interested in neither cultural Judaism nor Israel. Lester called Bar-Mitzvahs “stupid pageantry” and the Chosen people “egotistic bosh.”

His notes condemn drawing a line that’s arbitrary. For Lester, if you’re not going to continue some traditions, then why not drop all of them. He dismisses “the absurdities of fossilized ritual.” Lester’s passion for academic philosophy contributed to his rejection of Jewish rituals, but we already knew that.

At the bottom of that first page, Lester writes: “A good phrase ‘unsynagogued Jew’, but not broad enough for me. ‘Unsynagogued Jewish non-Jew’ is better.” Essentially, Lester felt that “Jewish” was accurate as an adjective to describe his roots, yet “Jew” was an inaccurate noun that didn’t describe himquintessentially. By distinguishing between having “Jewish” heritage and identifying as a “Jew,” however, he suggests to me that he sought an identity, or status, that was incompatible with being a Jew.

In his subsequent notes on Jewish thinker Isaac Breuer, Lester writes: “This argument that it is not race nor religion but history that links the Jew of today with the Jew of ancient Palestine is not convincing to me at all and, in fact, if true is all the more reason why I would have no part or parcel of Zionism.” For Jewish thinkers like Isaac Breuer and Lester Denonn, “there is no specific Jewish problem to be solved.” In 2018, it’s counterintuitive to read “there is no specific Jewish problem,” written barely two years after the murder of six million people in Europe.

On the following page, Lester wrote: “I live and thrill in the Fourth of July and not one whit in Passover!!!!!!!!!!” He literally included ten exclamation marks, clearly emotional about this. So, there we go: America. In the months immediately preceding the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, Lester seemed concerned that Jewish loyalties would isolate him from the United States, where his father was born, he was born, and he lived.

Jewish thinker Mordecai M. Kaplan was notable for his emphasis on Judaism as a civilization or a peoplehood, rather than a race or a religion. Regarding Mordecai Kaplan, Lester Denonn wrote a passage with so much to analyze that I can’t resist including it here:

“For him Judaism is a civilization. If that is what he means, then he makes no more appeal to me than would some supporter of the Chinese or Indian civilization. He wants an enthusiastic assumption of all Jewish culture with its fundamental pattern, its scale of values as the only (again his word) way to enable Judaism to be of service to the Jew. I am not at all impressed. I think it the utmost bosh, stuff and nonsense, and supercilious ancestor worship. I do not have the feeling for the preceding hundred generations of the Jewish peoples nor the desire to have Jewish life survive which he advocates. If this means assimilation, then make the most of it. I am not unmindful of the sorry plight of the Jew today as a result of views such as this, but I hope that I take the long view when I say that if all religions and religious differences and all races and all racial differences can be molded into a religion of humanity, then and not before can we have anything approaching a Parliament of Man rather than a debating society of a League of Nations or a United Nations with its faulty emphasis on nations rather than on the peoples of the world.”

Lester seems to oppose the system of nation-states here, yet he previously condoned the Fourth of July with ten exclamation points.

After all my research, maybe Lester observed Christmas just because most Americans celebrated it. If an annual holiday pulled him out of philosophizing and reviewing books for The New York Times, he didn’t want it to be particular to his family’s culture or religion.

Today, there are various reasons why Jewish Americans might celebrate Christmas. They marry Christians in many cases, while others’ ancestors escaped persecution by converting to Christianity. For many other Jewish Americans, their enjoyment of Chinese food and the movies on Christmas constitutes a ritualistic, cultural celebration. Meanwhile, some might embrace Christmas rather than allow the American context to elevate a minor Jewish holiday, Chanukah.

Historically speaking, my family’s celebration of Christmas stems partially from Christian America’s – especially elite New York society’s – motivating an atheist philosopher to accept Christmas as his own, while condemning Jewish traditions as ritualistic.