News

Meet the Atheist Jew Fighting to Take God Out of the Holidays

Image by Wikimedia

By Daniel J. Solomon December 7, 2016

‘Tis the season — for presents, caroling and the anti-Christmas billboard campaign run by David Silverman, head of the American Atheists group that every year urges Americans to avoid religious celebrations of Christmas.

“Make Christmas Great Again. Skip Church!” reads one of the signs, which are running in Colorado, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. Another features a text conversation in which a girl tells a friend that she won’t be going to services this holiday season, with the tag line “Atheist Christmas. The more, the merrier!”

This round of billboards represents a toning-down from previous iterations of the campaign, which three years ago attracted criticism from some after American Atheists mounted a billboard in Times Square that referred to Jesus as a “myth.”

Image by AmericanAtheists.org

Silverman has led quite a Jewish life in some ways, growing up in a Reform congregation, attending Brandeis University and forming relationships with liberal Jewish groups like Workmen’s Circle and the Society for Humanistic Judaism. He even celebrates the holiday season — with Passover’s matzo ball soup, but still.

Silverman defended the billboard initiative in a press release this month. “It is important for people to know religion has nothing to do with being a good person, and that being open and honest about what you believe — and don’t believe — is the best gift you can give this holiday season,” he said. “More and more Americans are leaving religion, but we still have work to do when it comes to fighting the stigma many atheists face.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO