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Friday September 11, 1998

Hallmark's `Mrs. Santa Claus' deserves Jewish protest

Rabbi Elliot B. Gertel

Have you seen Hallmark's new "Christmas classic"?

"Mrs. Santa Claus," a TV musical first shown in 1996, glorifies intermarriage and suggests that all civil liberties in America, including the lighting of Shabbat candles, are the result of Christmas parties.

It pairs off Sadie, a Jewish suffragette, with an ambitious Italian immigrant. The duo leads catchy tunes that may become interdating and intermarriage theme songs: "Like pickled herring and vanilla ice cream-ah we don't go together at all-ah. [L]ike a bowl of borscht and pizza pie-ah opposites attract."

Here is the ultimate musical education number to tell Jewish youngsters that they don't need to seek their happiness -- spiritual and matrimonial -- in their sacred covenant with God.

That scenario gives tremendous nachas (joy) to Mrs. Santa Claus, alias Mrs. North, played with aplomb by Angela Lansbury.

Mrs. Santa Claus buys two tickets to the police officers' Christmas party. One is for Sadie so she can be the first "Jewish girl [to] make a Christmas toast." The other is for Sadie's mother, who fears the local cops as she feared the Cossacks in Europe and who needs to overcome her fear by perhaps marrying an officer in an interfaith union of her own.

So why am I getting worked up about an almost 2-year-old Christmas program now? Because Hallmark has already shown this vulgar piece of work two years in a row -- almost unheard of for a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" offering -- and plans to make it a perennial children's Christmas classic.

And now that CBS has lost "Wizard of Oz" to cable, the network is looking to promote other "classics." I'm urging you to protest to Hallmark and Hallmark Entertainment, four months before this ugly fare is repeated.

To be honest, I have already tried this myself and have been patently unsuccessful. I have repeatedly called and written to Hallmark and CBS. And I've learned the way they deal with concerned viewers. They are rude and inefficient when a caller simply asks where to direct letters of concern. Mid-level executives fail to acknowledge letters and reviews. And CEOs, whom I located with the help of a sympathetic Hallmark shop owner, patronize and dismiss viewpoints with "That's not the way I interpret it."

And much to my shame, our national synagogue organizations are of no help whatsoever and show no real interest. The president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the social action office of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and officials of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, as well as all three major rabbinical groups, told me that the issue is too narrow, too general or too early in the season to be raised.

Now I know that the subject of intermarriage is a sensitive one.

Many intermarried couples have found a home in traditional and liberal congregations and are rightly cherished for their commitment to raising children as Jews. I remain a fervent believer in outreach in such situations, even though I would not officiate at a mixed marriage.

But Hallmark's wholesale (or rather, retail and lucrative) advocacy of an outmoded and offensive "melting pot" ideology as "The American Way" should concern anyone who cares about the future of Judaism and about genuine American pluralism.

Particularly disturbing is the show's projection of current accommodation of mixed marriage upon the past. Given the social and economic realities of the time, a Jewish woman who intermarried around the turn of the century ostracized herself from her family and her Jewish community. And she most likely raised the children in the husband's faith, if in any faith at all.

Back then, intermarriage often meant apostasy from Judaism. Yet the number of Jews who intermarried at that time was very small. Jewish children today need to understand that crucial fact. To project back a larger statistic of mixed marriages and the better (but by no means assured) possibility of raising children as Jews is to ignore the precarious conditions for Jewish life, then and now.

Had our grandmothers done as immigrants what Sadie and her mother are bent on doing -- and encouraged to do so via Mrs. Santa Claus -- we would not be Jews today with the remotest interest in reading a Jewish publication.

Hallmark has every right to produce "Mrs. Santa Claus" and to market it as a video. But we as American Jews have every right to protest the marketing of concepts and falsehoods destructive to our faith and misleading to our children.

Hallmark announced this summer a major effort to get Jewish business through b'nai mitzvah and confirmation cards and similar products. Now, at the start of this new Hallmark marketing enterprise, is the time for Jews to make our concerns known.

Please write to Irvine O. Hockaday, Jr., president and chief executive officer of Hallmark Cards, Inc., 2501 McGee, P.O. Box 419580, Kansas City, MO 64141. And send a copy to Bob Halmi Jr., president and chief executive officer, Hallmark Entertainment, Inc., 1325 Avenue of the Americas, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10019.

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