Hanukkah
What are we to make of the fiery images, stories, and rituals that inform Jewish liturgy and Jewish self-understanding?
Ma’oz Tsur’s last verse was repressed for centuries.
Just in time for Hanukkah.
The book of Esther and the festival of Purim mark the beginnings of the exilic world, in which the battle to remain Jewish never really goes away.
Lighting the menorah in the Gulag.
Guess who left out God?
Yitzchok Hutner’s kabbalistic interpretation of the holiday.
Pride without meaning or responsibility is a hollow sort of cool.
Archaeologists are reviving a 145-year-old hypothesis.
The custom of parents giving their children coins on Hanukkah—known as Hanukkah gelt—is well-known today, but goes almost unmentioned in pre-20th-century sources. It seems that. . .
Hanukkah may be one of the best-known Jewish holidays, but its status is anomalous if not marginal. The two books of Maccabees were excluded from. . .
The lexical fusion of “Thanksgiving” and “Hanukkah” might be artificial, but the invention of portmanteau words is an old American tradition.
In changing the holiday emphasis from the Maccabees’ successful uprising to the miracle of the oil, were the rabbis dissociating themselves from the later,. . .
Hanukkah reminds us that while both the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers had a divine mission, the mission was not the same. (1967)