This is the Forward’s coverage of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.
Hanukkah
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Community The Hanukkah miracle of a UAE-Israel menorah lighting
Do miracles still happen? If you ask me, yes. But as the story of Hanukkah exemplifies, they are often lived out by human beings doing holy work. This week, we might have borne witness to another one. Never did I imagine that I would be standing on a 31st floor balcony in Manhattan with the…
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Community Without Jewish family, converts usually celebrate Jewish holidays; in quarantine, she found a way
My husband and I celebrated our first Hanukkah together before we were formally Jewish. It was a month before our conversion classes at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago had even begun, but I didn’t want to wait. We had just suffered our second consecutive pregnancy loss and I was desperate to be embraced by the…
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Culture The dinosaur menorah started as a hobby. Here’s how it became the internet’s weirdest Judaica trend.
Eleven months out of the year, Benjamin Packard is a pretty normal guy. Packard, 37, lives in Oakland, California. He enjoys a rewarding career as a “mild-mannered financial advisor who helps millennials prepare for retirement.” He’s an enthusiastic dad to two young kids. But as Hanukkah approaches, everything changes. “Every holiday season, for about thirty…
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Culture Smokey Robinson stumped about how to say ‘Hanukkah’
Some say the Jews control the entertainment industry. If that’s the case, riddle me this: How could Motown legend Smokey Robinson, a six-decade veteran of major record labels, not know how to pronounce Hanukkah — or even have any idea what it is? We can thank Twitter user Jeff Jacobson for an unforgettable record of…
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Community Hanukkah’s lesson about antisemitism on the Left
There’s a popular joke that every Jewish holiday can be summed up as “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” It’s an aphorism that’s especially apt for the two rabbinic holidays on the Jewish calendar, Purim and Hanukkah, which we’re currently celebrating. In the Purim story, Haman wished to kill all the Jews…
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Fast Forward Assault reported at Chabad of the Bluegrass menorah-lighting in Lexington, Kentucky
(JTA) — A Chabad center in Lexington, Kentucky, will see increased police presence for the rest of Hanukkah after an assault during one of the community’s public menorah lightings. A driver directed anti-Semitic language at people lighting the menorah outside Chabad of the Bluegrass, police told the local TV station. When someone from the community…
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Community The ghost of Hanukkah past
The toughest question was not: what items to keep and what to let go of? Standing in my fully filled childhood home after my father’s death in 2015, the real kishka cruncher was: which memories to keep and which to let go of? At age 50, my bittersweet job was to partner with my big…
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Community Our era’s Maccabee moment is now
This year, we have to remember the original meaning of Hanukkah. What many of us associate with the holiday — a little bit of oil miraculously going a long way — seems profoundly underwhelming for a God who creates the world and redeems nations from slavery. Some will say it is precisely this fact, that…
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