we felt very awkward and left out with no christmas celebration the way the other kids did so mom let us celebrate christmas it is after all half of the heritage. my mom was absolutely resistant and refused she would not acknowledge christmas for many years. we kept lobbying her. we feel left out. let us celebrate christmas. no. no. no. you are jewish. finally when we were teenagers we said we will take it anymore we will celebrate christmas like our friends and neighbors but this is what we will do we will call it a hanukkah bush instead of a christmas tree we had all of these compromises to placate my mom we also played rock of ages when we played jingle bells we finally got our tree
america, the first of 17 children to graduate high school, first to speak english as well as spanish, and met my mom in the cafeteria about five blocks from here. she was a waitress, lily friedman from newark, new jersey, and my dad cruz rivera from san juan. rachel: how did they navigate this? she was very devout and jewish, your dad was catholic and very devout, so how did this family melt this tradition? great question. my mom insisted that my dad followed jewish tradition, even though he was a deacon in the church, very, very catholic, but he loved my mom, and because of that, he kind of nominally went through the routines of being jewish. rachel: but then you said you wanted a tree, and your mom said no! my mom said no tree, so we said how about we call it a hanukkah bush? and i didn t sell until we were teenagers.
finally we convinced my mom to go along with it, so the hanukkah bush became our seven l of the holiday. rachel: i know at christmas time you bring your family together and yeah, there s a lot of jewish traditions, but you cannot help being puerto rican, geraldo, so listen to what i brought for you. baila, come on, rachel. sean will not be jealous. rachel: i love that you melted these traditions. what is your favorite holiday thing to eat? well, my mom cooks potato latkes, but because of the puerto rican sign, also rice an. we would have potato latkes and rice and beans and that was all combination. she cooked cakes, baked cakes and so forth. but we really celebrated in a way that was multicultural. eventually, our big, big family got together. they love each other.
speak to jessica and i are the hanukkah bush. the discolored hanukkah bush. julie: i do not remember that color scheme. but anyway. moving on, you know, this is a busy week. you would think that congress would have its ducks in a row before the holiday is everybody would. but i don t know if you heard, they don t. adjourn for business over the weekend with no spending deal in sight. the biggest sticking point is of course the president trump push for border wall funding. nl the white house this morning that the shutdown could last until the new year blaming democrats for the holdup. here is incoming active chief of staff. the problem of course is that as recently as two weeks ago $1.6 billion for the same thing. so they are moving in the wrong direction. i think it is overly good question as to whether or not the deal can be cut before the new congress comes in. julie: but democrats are not backing down, vowing to oppose any new funding for the president s border wall. they will
a full accounting for the mistakes of the previous bush administration. and the people that were the foreign policy architects of that. the decision to go into iraq, the decisions about afghanistan. and i think that s where a lot of people that are coming forward that are anti-trump, maybe never-trump, but a lot of the bases looking at them and saying, you are the ones that made mistake after mistake in the middle east. we do not need you lecturing us. that s what came out. morgan: one of the things that the president forces the republican party to do is to have these uncomfortable conversations about foreign policy. and suddenly the people who are not criticizing the president over this decision were democrats. as we go into a 2020 where there will be so many democrats running, what do you think the democrats stand on foreign policy? because hillary had a different tweet. jessica: absolutely, we saw the division coming out in the primary, bernie sanders had a different form policy