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3. Children Light Up
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74 > 75 could encourage American Jewish children to embrace their religion and so also adopted the new custom. Lay leaders, too—especially charitable women and female teachers—also arranged the festivals for the children they served. By the closing years of the century, Jewish children enjoyed these novel Hanukkah events annually in many different congregations as well as in charitable societies around the country. These new festivities added a new way for American Jews to celebrate Hanukkah and another reason for them to do so. In those latter decades, Isaac M. Wise worked closely with another Cincinnati reformer, Rabbi Max Lilienthal, to create the synagoguebased Hanukkah festival for children. In it, they recounted the exploits of the heroic Maccabees, performed the Hanukkah candle-lighting rite, and provided sweets to the youngsters, hoping to create a happy occasion that would educate the children while instilling Jewish loyalty and strengthening Jewish identity. These new synagogue Hanukkah festivals also set in motion a dynamic relationship between clergy and laity, as women framed the Hanukkah rite—usually conducted by rabbis—with activities they believed children would enjoy, while rabbis strived to oversee the events. Wise and Lilienthal promoted these festivals to Jews around the country, but local congregations implemented them according to their own abilities and desires. The emerging variations shaped the new festivals in ways that reflected local ideals. The rabbis’ turn to childhood echoed similar trends in American society, in which domestic and church activities created by women aimed to strengthen religious and familial bonds while also pleasing children. In fact, post–Civil War American culture increasingly looked to children for emotional rewards. Earlier in the century, Americans began looking to domestic relationships for the emotional honesty that could offset the less trustworthy interaction with strangers that became a growing part of success in urbanizing America.1 By wartime, “Adults relied on children emotionally to offset personal hardship,” explains family historian Anne Carver Rose. Because children were thought to bring feelings “simpler and more innocent” than those of any adult, these feelings “could be returned without reserve.”2 Americans saw that attitude reflected back to them in their cultural products; women’s magazines especially promoted it. In the midst of the Civil War, Sara Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Ladies’ Book, the most successful women’s magazine [44.192.75.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:08 GMT) 76 > 77 riage could induce a gentile to join them. Christians also assumed that conversion to Judaism was bizarre. In one famous case, when Quaker Warder Cresson converted to Judaism in 1848, his family tried to have him legally declared insane.7 Without Jews having the option to proselytize , Jewish children were, quite literally, Judaism’s only future. And yet few nineteenth-century American Jews living in a country dominated by an enticing evangelical Christianity could take their children’s Jewishness—and thus the future of their religion—for granted. Wise, for his part, believed that American public schools themselves constituted the primary hurdle Jewish children needed to overcome in remaining Jewish. By idealizing national heroes such as George Washington and promoting the simple moral lessons featured in the popular school-book series called McGuffey’s Readers, he believed American schools neglected the heroes and movements of the more distant past.8 Wise judged this a “radical error in our American system of education ” because children should be taught “to imitate the sublime virtues of classic men.” Moreover, the schools’ narrow focus on the “spots [of the globe where] the history of the United States was enacted” made it more difficult to teach Jewish children to admire Jewish heroes who lived millennia ago across the planet. He pointed out that every Jewish “feast . . . admonished you . . . [to] Remember the days of old, understand the years of past generations.” In a Hanukkah editorial of 1870, Wise exhorted parents to teach Jewish history to their children.9 Lilienthal carried the same message about honoring past heroes directly to children in his monthly magazine: “Always mind it, dear young readers, that your own Jewish history is as great and glorious as that of any other nation,” he wrote. “You have ample reason to be proud.”10 Lilienthal further blended Hanukkah’s story with American history. Linking the libretto for Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus oratorio to lore about the American revolutionary Patrick Henry, Lilienthal wrote that Mattathias, father of Judah the Maccabee, began the revolt against Antiochus with the battle cry “Give me Liberty or Give me...