“Our Thanksgiving holiday is a kind of cultural ritual that embodies both real people and real history but with cultural symbolism and mythology,” says Chris Lewis. “We are not really celebrating the real actors and the real characters, we’re celebrating or re-enacting a union between Indians and English peoples that we would like to think somehow symbolizes the hope of American society and the hope of freedom and unity in that society.”

U. COLORADO (US)—The oft-told story of the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrating and befriending each other is more myth than truth, says scholar Chris Lewis. The two groups tolerated each other out of necessity.

What is considered to be the first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth Plantation in about 1621, between the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims, was not the celebration of thanks as we think of it today, says Lewis, an American studies instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Instead, it was a celebration of the annual harvest and it most likely took place in late September.

]]> http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/thanksgivings-grain-of-truth/feed/ 0 http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/stories-of-the-holocaust-etched-in-jewish-psyche/ http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/stories-of-the-holocaust-etched-in-jewish-psyche/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:10:05 +0000 Futurity-Jenny Leonard http://futurity.org/?p=405

The new book on the effects of the Holocaust by New York University Professor Hasia Diner.

NYU (US)—The horrors of the Holocaust have been woven into the very fabric of Jewish families and communities. That finding comes from New York University Professor Hasia Diner, who recently completed an exhaustive review of Jewish life in America over the nearly two decades following World War II.

Her work challenges the existing post-war narrative of the Holocaust that posits American Jews turned away from the genocide in Europe and instead focused on the comforts of suburbia and other benefits generated by the 1950s economic boom.

]]> http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/stories-of-the-holocaust-etched-in-jewish-psyche/feed/ 0