Seinfeld pulls off a similar trick. Just as atheism is really religion in darker shades, the show about nothing is really a show about something grim. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Festivus” episode, which begins with the Hanukkah party of a dentist who converted to Judaism for the jokes, proceeds with a scheme to replace holiday gifts with contributions to fictitious charities, and ends with the dour holiday for the rest of us. That all these plot lines are concerned with religion is not accidental. Seinfeld’s Manhattan is far from a cosmopolitan playground: It is a little island crammed with nasty little people who wave their empty pieties around like pointy sticks, eager to injure each other.

Like Hitchens and the early Zionists, Seinfeld, too, took pride in its wit and irreverence in exposing the fraudulent fools who hide behind religion’s tall walls. Hitchens had Falwell; Jerry has Tim Whatley, the dentist whose reasoning for converting to Judaism is dubious and whose gift-giving practices are Madoff-esque. That Falwell and Whatley were indeed charlatans—I fully subscribe to Hitchens’ assessment of the man who blamed Sept. 11 on gays and the ACLU—matters little. What matters is what we’re left with after the laugh track dies down. And what we’re left with is Festivus…

It’s a sad worldview. It’s also profoundly un-Jewish. When faced with the breakdown of religion—which Jews had to do a month after the inception of their organized faith, when those congregated at the foothills of Mount Sinai built themselves a Golden Calf—we do not mock or reject but lament.