This Hanukkah Parody Of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Is The Greatest Ever

From the ‘Bohemian Chanukah’ video Image by YouTube Screenshot (Six13)

By Jenny Singer November 28, 2018

Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? Before our very eyes, a Jewish a cappella group has produced the Hanukkah parody song and video to leave all others in the dust.

Move over, Maccabeats, “Bohemian Chanukah,” a parody of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” is the musical equivalent of being wrapped in a plush throw blanked and spoon-fed warmed latkes by the friendly ghost of Flavius Josephus.

Six13, an all-male Jewish a cappella group, released their seasonal parody spectacular on social media on Tuesday. Normally, every word in that sentence (with the possible exception of “Jewish”) would make us roll our eyes. But this song succeeds because it embraces the greasy, cheesy tradition of Hanukkah music, parody songs, and a cappella.

It somewhat massacres the story of Hanukkah (the assailants were the Seleucids, a more specific group than the “Greeks;” the Maccabees left a more complex legacy that just “freedom,” etc,) and dives nose-first into the schmaltzy references Hanukkah allows — food, lights, dreidels, bubbies — but hey, it’s a parody song, not a journal article. The grating perfection of the precisely pitched male pop voices are a bearable stand in for Freddie Mercury’s perfect sound, and the “Night at the Opera” sendup early in the video is as on-point as a perfectly spun dreidel.

We miss the presence of…what do you call them? Ah yes — women — in this video. Other than that, it’s pretty perfect.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO