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In this month of holy religious holidays, here are a few great titles to study the major Abrahamic religions and their tenets.  

Christian Nativity

This Hindu festival celebrates spring, love and new life. Holi marks the end of winter and beginning of spring. It also celebrates the Hindu god Krishna and the legend of Holika and Prahlad.  The wicked Holika tried to kill Prahlad in flame, but Lord Krishna stepped in to save Prahlad, and Holika was left in the fire and burned to death. On the night before the festival, images of Holika are burned on huge bonfires, drums pound, horns blow, and people whoop.  Since Antiquity, to mark the spring equinox, the whole of India celebrates Holi, the festival of colors. During this celebration, Indians of all castes throw colored powder in the faces of those they meet.  It doesn't matter if you're lower caste, a widow, a person marked by society -- the powder makes everyone look the same. 

Covering in red is for love, green is happiness, orange is for prosperity, and gold is considered sacred. 

Restrictions of caste, sex, age, and personal differences are ignored.  The festival reminds the Hindi peoples that all discrimination disappears in the holiest gazes.

For 14 centuries the season of Lent has been a time for self-examination and penitence in preparation for Easter.  When public penitents came to the church for forgiveness, the priest would take some ash (made by burning the palms used on Palm Sunday of the previous year) and mark their foreheads with the sign of the cross as a reminder that they were but ashes and dust.  The period lasts for two lunar months through Easter of the year. 

So, for centuries, the first day of Lent was marked by a pre-Lent period of revelry, usually commencing on the last day of Christmas season and gaining traction as the faithful knew that "Fat Tuesday" would mark the last day of enjoyment of pleasures of the body.  The first day of Carnival (the celebratory lunar cycle) varies with both national and local traditions. Thus, in Munich in Bavaria the Carnival season, there called Fasching, begins on the feast of the Epiphany (January 6), while in Cologne in the Rhineland it begins on November 11 at 11:11 am (11th month, day, hour, and minute). In France the celebration is restricted to Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) and to mi-carème (the Thursday of the third week of Lent). More generally, the commencement date is Quinquagesima Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday), and the termination is Shrove Tuesday. 

In the United States, New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama became epicenters for Mardi Gras celebrations.

In 1872, the Krewe of Rex initiated the Mardi Gras colors of purple (for justice), gold (for power), and green (for faith). These were the family colors of visiting Russian Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff, whose favorite song, “If Ever I Cease to Love,” also became the official anthem of the New Orleans Mardi Gras.   Carnival unleashed the urban tensions between these ethnic and religious groups through clouds of flour. A visitor from Britain described the Mardi Gras of 1846, saying, "There was a grand procession parading the streets, almost every one dressed in the most grotesque attire, troops of them on horseback, some in open carriages, with bands of music, and in a variety of costumes... All wore masks, and here and there in the crowd, or stationed in a balcony above, we saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on any one who seemed particularly proud of his attire." A local told the Brit that Mardi Gras meant "flour and fun." Some scholars have viewed the raucous dusting as a remnant from Roman festivals, in which flour symbolized fertility. In New Orleans, it was a commodity symbolic of the agricultural riches that flowed down the Mississippi River to the city's docks.

Communities in New Orleans, of both sacred and secular identity, employ images of Native Americans as icons of spiritual power and presence. Acting as an instance of co-narration,  clergy and congregants of Spiritualist/Spiritual churches - whose narratives of the Indian spirits find expression through interlacing oral and ritual performances - have helped to establish a sacred dimension for Indian processions in New Orleans, adding an overtly spiritual note to otherwise secular 'rites of territory repossessed'. Through community response to the death of Big Chief Allison 'Tootie' Montana, and the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in 2006, Indian icons and imagery still stand for many New Orleanians as powerful signs of something in the soul that, to paraphrase a popular Mardi Gras Indian song, won't kneel and won't bow down. 

Mardi Gras arrived with French settlers to New Orleans in 1703, but in Mobile they like to start the story with Michael Krafft, a one-eyed cotton broker who got drunk with friends on New Year's Eve in 1830 and raided Partridge Hardware Store, seizing hoes and forks and marauding through the streets to the mayor's house, where he was invited in for breakfast. Krafft formed the first society--or "mystic order" --to lead a parade around the city. Other cotton workers set up a rival group. Then more emerged, tied up with the city's businesses, with names like medieval guilds: the Knights of Revelry, the Maids of Mirth.

Where you celebrate, how you celebrate -- it's all a party during Mardi Gras!

On June 12, 1942, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. For two years, her family and other families will be hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends.  Her words and thoughts form the basis of an on-the-ground cultural interpreter of a horrific historical event, a small red-and-white checked remembrance of war and bigotry, and of the courage of families who sought a way out of the Nazi regime.  

Her name was Anne Frank.   She received her diary 93 years ago.  

In her first entry, Anne wrote to her diary as if it was a personal friend; “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”  But she was also growing in maturity, and realizing that her parents' birthday present was a way to answer the call of the Dutch government-in-exile: tell us your stories.  For two years, the girl wrote in the diary, describing her most intimate thoughts and feelings, as well as documenting what it was like to live under German occupation and in hiding.  The adults around her and in far flung places begged their children to remember these times, and Anne wrote as a diarist with a mission: to preserve her thoughts and ideas as well as the actions of those around her.  Her hope was that she would survive to contribute the diary to a larger purpose.   Her horror is that she did not survive, but the diary did.   

Interpretations of the diary in the years after Otto Frank provided it as an example of Holocaust diarist writing abound.  Several plays completely dolled up his daughter into the perfect icongraphic dead Jewish girl whose death happens off-stage; at least one novel sexed her up, by speculating on her secret romance with a boy from another family.   Otto himself stands accused of tearing out pages that described unhappy marital relations with his wife.  It seems that Anne's writing changed perspective with the editors who were studying her life.  The runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published.  As Dara Horn described it in her book People Love Dead Jews, her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a 13-year-old girl.  Anne rewrote the diary; she edited and prepared it for revisions, a talented writer far from the public perception of a mindless girl documenting her life.   Horn writes:  "The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. "

Over time various cultures have interpreted the text in different ways.  What the reception of Frank's text in Cambodia and North Korea suggests is that the way in which an account travels primarily indicates the text's usefulness in the contexts in which it's received.  Much has been written about teaching and learning about the Holocaust in social studies classrooms.  The redemptive power of Anne's story is seen as neglible to school children exposed to her diary in 8th grade or thereabouts; while the work is relatable to them, containing both arguments with parents and melodramatic declarations they may be akin to understand, it also presents a somewhat sanitized version of "the Holocaust."   They do not get to see Anne dying slowly in Bergen-Belsen, rather seeing only the girl who took off her shoes to avoid heel clatter and whose story ends at the window rather than the grave.

The diary remains a substantial artefact from the German occupation, its talented author a quintessential unknown in a Holocaust of her Jewish heritage, a voice cut short but living on in our collective memory.   And there, as they say, may her memory be a blessing.

"It's a warning, I suppose, to people to be vigilant, not to be bystanders, but to speak out if they encounter bad things, or evil things."



"We've been working with a group called 3GNY. And it is the grandchildren of survivors who are being trained to tell their grandparents' stories. We did talk about, what does it mean to pass on your story? OK, because we're not on this world forever. So what do you leave behind?"



"People ask me, how do you feel that you survived and other members didn't? You know what I answer them? I say God needed a witness, someone who can tell the story."