War holiday redux

Tonight begins the third night of Hanukkah. The 2024 edition of the Festival of Lights, like last year’s, is especially uncomfortable for many Jews, including yours truly. It comes amid the wanton destruction of a people at the hands of an army with a Jewish star on its flag, armed with weapons largely supplied by my country — a country to which many of our families, including mine, fled to escape persecution mere generations ago.

In the time since last Hanukkah, Israel’s erasure of Gaza has reached proportions that could only be described as biblical: wiping cities recently home to tens of thousands of people off the face of the Earth, and forcibly starving whole families, including children, for the crimes of their relatives or simply people who happen to live near them. A recent fight over a report of imminent famine was a grotesque illustration of the point. The U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning System pulled its official warnings under pressure from Biden’s State Department. Its justification: the Israeli government’s insistence that so many people had been driven from northern Gaza that there were no longer enough people living there to qualify as living under famine conditions. (FEWS Net disagreed, telling the Associated Press that its “famine assessment holds even if as few as 10,000 people remain.”) Meanwhile, Israel has added by its reckoning no fewer than seven other fronts to its war.

The reason all this makes Hanukkah a particularly uncomfortable holiday is because, at bottom, it celebrates a war — a holy, anticolonial war, waged in areas now located in Israel and the West Bank over 2,100 years ago. Depending on how you look at it, Hanukkah can either be read as the ultimate Zionist holiday, a triumphant celebration of strict religious Judaism, a triumph of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare, or a fun kids’ holiday with no political and barely any religious content at all.

In fact, Hanukkah is all those things at once — its contradictions were all but baked into the holiday in its formation over two millennia ago. I wrote about that just before Hanukkah 2023¹ , in a post that, alas, is still relevant today. So I’m resharing it here for premium subscribers, with some light edits.

What is Hanukkah? The first answer, the one we often feel obligated to give in America, is that Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas. Sometimes its eight days coincide with Christmas; in many years, including this one, it will not.² The only features that it has in common with modern celebrations of Christmas are a penchant for twinkling lights and the giving of gifts. And that latter tradition, which started in the United States about a hundred years ago, was by all accounts a direct response to the Christmas marketing blitz, thanks to enterprising retailers and Jewish immigrants who didn’t want their children to feel left out.

Hanukkah was also, in sharp contrast to the Feast of the Nativity, a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar for most of history. In the Talmud—the core compendium of Jewish thought and tradition, composed in the centuries after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem that had been the center of Jewish life—other holidays, including Rosh Hashana, Passover, Shabbat, and Purim, get whole books. Hanukkah gets a few pages here and there; at one point the rabbis engage in a knockdown debate (the rabbis are always engaging in knockdown debates) over whether the celebration of Hanukkah should have been outlawed entirely.

This was in large part because one of the core stories of Hanukkah is of an anti-imperialist rebellion. The Kingdom of Judah—the place from which Jews derive our demonym (yehudi in Hebrew)—had been conquered since the sixth century BCE, first by the Babylonians, then the Persians, and finally the Greeks under Alexander the Great. In 174 BCE, one of Alexander’s distant successors, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, reinvaded Judea with the aim of either crushing Judaism per se or elevating into power the so-called “Hellenizing Jews”—Jews who were open to reading Greek philosophy and Greek practices such as the gymnasium—over what he saw as a more dangerous ideology that harkened back to older forms of Israelite worship.

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