Should we "Celebrate" Thanksgiving?

In recent months, I’ve worked with a group of Millennials and Gen-Xers. As a 70+ Boomer, these could by my kids or grandkids, and often find myself surprised and impressed by their passion, their energy, and their ideas. 

I also find myself suggesting they temper some of their ambitions and emotional responses to current events.

A recent discussion I observed regarded whether and how to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some had planned to meet at a local restaurant since they are either estranged from family, living too far from them or perhaps unable to afford travel. Some simply wanted to make sure that anyone in the group who didn’t have other friends or family to spend time with could be around other like minded people (this group shares a basic political point of view in resistance to the current administration).

One of the members expressed extreme discomfort with the idea of even getting together on Thanksgiving let alone “celebrating” it. This person expressed the argument that Thanksgiving is an aspect of colonialism, a celebration of the genocide of indigenous Americans and the capitalist theft of the lands we now call America. 

Early in the discussion they suggested that even sharing food and company would be a political statement in support of colonialism, the glorification of Western Civilization or even White nationalism over other cultures. The others didn’t disagree, but started brainstorming ways that the day could be re-purposed to express these values, such as to make a public announcement in the restaurant about the plight of Native Americans or maybe to have a candlelight vigil and proclaim it a “Day of Mourning,” rather than a day of giving thanks. 

As a Jewish American, although not one who has practiced the religion since my childhood, I thought  about all the holidays that my family either “celebrated” or “observed” that are Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter. My parents had decided that these holidays, though rooted in religious traditions our religion rejected, were so widespread that not participating would deprive their children of important lifetime experiences that would set us farther apart from our peers, which in the area I grew up and most of America, was overwhelmingly Christian. 

We ignored or tolerated the religious aspects of the holidays while enjoying the aspects most important to kids: giving and receiving presents, dyeing eggs, enjoying candy. It occurs to me that many Christian families similarly have decided that Halloween, though rooted in pagan rituals, mostly put those values and beliefs aside to allow their children to dress up and go Trick-or-Treating, an American tradition.

There is value, I believe, in not protesting every historical injustice, in not challenging everyone’s cultural point of view all the time, but there is also value in identifying and naming those injustices to educate people and inform those who may never have questioned them. 

President Donald Trump has signed executive orders that require the guardians and interpreters of our national history to highlight what he considers the accomplishments of the European immigrants who have made up the majority of the population since its founding as a nation and to downplay, or “erase” in the words of my younger friends, the suffering and discrimination of other groups the majority has caused. 

This Thanksgiving season (as for many, my Thanksgiving often involves gatherings with different groups of family and friends over the course of a week or more), I will give thanks for the health and good lives my family and I enjoy and also for the recent election, which showed that Americans are waking up and angered by the policies of this administration and are ready to elect new leaders when given the opportunity.

I will also be mindful that my family's successes and our health are (to a not insignificant degree) owed to the privileged middle class upbringing we enjoyed, our educational opportunities, and the racial privileges we benefit from in the United States due our "Whiteness". Injustice that has been visited on groups of Americans who fled to America because of injustice they experienced elsewhere, as the Pilgrims did, is the story of America. Their escape and immigration story should be told around American dinner tables at Thanksgiving, much as Jewish families tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt at their tables during the Jewish holiday of Passover. 

But the decimation and ongoing discrimination of indigenous populations due to disease, wars, and genocide (a common expression of those times “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” clearly shows the  intent) should also be a part of Thanksgiving conversation.

Paul Epstein is a retired teacher and musician living in Charleston 

published with minor edits in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, 11/25/2025

Thoughts on Belief on Passover, Easter

As a humanist (non-theist), I understand the desire that people have to believe that there is a force for good looking over and protecting them and their loved ones and forgive them for their seeming lack of ability to imagine how that might seem when applied to those whose lives are negatively impacted in any given situation. It always drives me crazy to hear someone describe some incident in which others were hurt or died, but they or their loved one survived by saying, "God was watching over (me or them)."

"Oh, really," I want to say, "but He didn't care about the others?" Of course they would likely come back with "He has his own plan" or some such.....But, that is just what they need to make sense of the world, and many studies have shown that people who believe in these ways get health benefits from this kind of thinking, although it looks like denial to me.

I wrote the above in response to a Facebook post in which someone had made a similar observation regarding lyrics in a Garth Brooks song about souls being called to earth to be born to wonderful mothers. She wondered about the babies being born to less desirable parents and situations.

And then I remembered that last night was the beginning of Passover and tomorrow is Easter. No, I did nothing to observe Passover last night. 

I was raised in a Jewish family by educated parents who were not terribly religious, though we attended services in a Reform congregation somewhat regularly through the year and on holidays, I attended Sunday School and had Hebrew lessons twice a week for a couple years preparing for Bar Mitzvah. But part of the rebellion of my young adulthood was a disavowal of religious belief, and I have only been back in synagogues for family weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and funerals since.

Passover, which celebrates the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt recounted in the Book of Exodus, is a perfect example of a religious belief in which God is watching over only certain people, not others. Moses demands that Pharoah release the Jews; he refuses, and God unleashes various plagues until finally the Jews are instructed to mark their doors with the blood of a lamb and the Angel of Death is sent to kill all the firstborn sons of the unmarked households. Hence the holiday is named "Passover," since the Jewish households were passed over and their children spared.

According to the Christian Bible, Jesus and his disciples were eating the Passover dinner, the Sedar, in what has come to be called the Last Supper. Jesus was a devout Jew, a rabbi, though his teachings challenged the powerful Jewish priesthood at the Temple in Jerusalem and the Roman notion that Caesar was a living god.  The Romans could put up with an invisible Jewish god, but not with a man who had thousands of followers who proclaimed him King of the Jews and possibly the Messiah.

The message of Easter (apologies to any Christians who may ask how a lapsed Jew has the chutzpah to interpret their religion), while broadening the extent to which the heretofore God of the Jews would extend his love and protections to anyone, Jew or Gentile, limits his favor to those who acknowledge faith in Jesus Christ. 

I don't hate religions or religious people, but I recognize that religions are exclusive clubs. They subscribe to the "only-one-True-religion" thesis. While most of them invite others to share their beliefs, too often they find other religions or even sects within their own religion threatening, and since in their belief system God favors them, blesses them, they sometimes feel justified in discriminating against or even attacking others. While there are benefits in belonging to religious groups, such as the wonderful charitable work they do for their own members and for others outside their groups, and for the teaching of moral lessons inherent in all religions, I would on this holiday pray if I were religious, but hope since I am not, that my religious friends would contemplate whether the sense that their god protects and favors them affects the way they think about people who are different or believe differently than they do.