Jews Have Angels, Too!

My brief career in the 1990s running the Judaica shop at the New Haven JCC happened to coincide with the pre-millennial rise of pop angelology in America. Angels were all over the zeitgeist: on mugs, T-shirts, greeting cards, key chains, and of course, television. The CBS series Touched by an Angel premiered in September 1994, the same month ABC’s primetime special Angels: The Mysterious Messengers aired, hosted by Patty Duke. Bookstores were adding special angel sections to accommodate the proliferation of books on the subject, starting with Sophy Burnham’s best-selling The Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present, and True Stories of How They Touch Our Lives. Even Hillary Clinton liked to wear an angel’s wings pin “on days she needs help,” according to a December 1993 Time cover story titled “Angels Among Us.”

Jews, though, were largely immune to the trend: At the Judaica shop, when I proudly displayed a tin Oaxacan angel hanukkiah, obtained from the Jewish Museum’s wholesale division, JCC shoppers shrank from it as if it were radioactive. As it turns out, the tradition of angels has never been as widely accepted among Jews (or Muslims, for that matter) as it has among Christians, even though Jews were the creative forces behind such works as Broadway’s Angels in America and the angel-themed movie Michael. So, even as 75 percent of Americans say they believe in angels, according to a 2007 Gallup poll, many American Jews believe that their religious tradition doesn’t have room for such winged imagery.