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This chapter focuses on the descriptions of a single festival—Yom Kippur. Out of all the possible holidays, Yom Kippur has been chosen for several reasons. To begin with, it comes up more often than any other festival in the ethnographic accounts, so that there is more material on the Day of Atonement than any other topic. Moreover, Yom Kippur constitutes one of the most important festivals on the Jewish calendar, which helps explain why it attracted so much attention from Christian authors. As a result, it also stands to reason that writing about Yom Kippur is more comprehensive than any of the other holidays.

This chapter explores the ways in which the nation constructs itself in relation to Jews, and how Jews actively participate in this historical revision. The recognition of the small population is mutually strategic as well as corrective: for Brazilian society, it is one example of a larger project to recast contemporary Brazil as a modern, multicultural nation. For Brazilian Jews, this rewriting of Brazilian history and the re-inscription of the landscape to reflect their presence serve to powerfully transmit the memory of their participation—acts that are infused with the hope of securing a place in the nation and confirming a sense of belonging.

This chapter sketches the history of yontef-bletlekh (holiday pages). First published in the mid-1890s, yontef-bletlekh were initially conceived as a means of circumventing the Russian censor’s ban on Yiddish periodicals. The ruse, which took advantage of looser regulations on “one-time journals”, was premised on the fact that almost every month in the Hebrew calendar has a Jewish holiday. Hence, by publishing a one-time journal in relation to each holiday—each with a unique title—one could create a de facto periodical. This concept of creating a one-time journal filled with secular content but labeled with a holiday-related title and published during holidays would subsequently be appropriated by Yiddish humorists, who would begin publishing satire magazines on Jewish holidays on an annual basis. This mainly Warsaw-based humoristic-journalistic subgenre included hundreds of publications and comprised nearly a quarter of all Yiddish journalistic endeavors in the Pale and in Poland from the turn of the 20th century until the Second World War. Indeed, it accounted for a significant proportion of Yiddish periodical titles as a whole.

This chapter reviews Dianne Ashton’s Hanukkah in America: A History, which chronicles how a once minor holiday gradually became (along with Passover) one of the most significant days on the American Jewish calendar, as well as the most prominent symbol of Jewish culture in the wider American milieu. Ashton points to four factors that moved Hanukah to the center stage of American Jewish life. First, the candle-lighting ceremony is simple, short, and easily performed. Second, it falls during the December holiday season, at a time when American culture sanctifies the cult of family and children. Third, the original story can be retold in diverse ways to suit American Jewish dilemmas, while always featuring the heroes as “us” American Jews. And finally, because the story underlines the tension between miraculous intervention and the Jews’ religious devotion, it serves to trigger conversations about the role of religion and God in modern life.