Hanukkah

Celebrating Thanksgiving, the American Jewish Festival of Freedom

There is no more Jewish holiday than Thanksgiving. It’s my second-favorite Jewish holiday. (My most favorite is Sukkot, because it’s so much about culture and history, welcoming friends and family to our temporary “home,” having time to cook, and it’s focused on the intangibles rather than the material.) I love Thanksgiving because a) there’s no…

No More Sukkah, Time for Hanukkah and the Spinagogue

Proving that Jewish consumer culture is devouring the calendar every bit as voraciously as any other culture in America, Modern Tribe has just sent out notice of the home they have built for the dreidel — the “Spinagogue.” Homelessness and hunger are indeed terrible problems in our world. Glad that Sarah Silverman and Modern Tribe…

Eighth Night Yid Vid: What Is This Hanukkah Thing All About?

So we’ve had seven nights of Hanukkah videos. We’ve watched singing cowboys, rapping Jewesses, will.i.am impersonators, melodious philosemitism, a comic spilling the beans on George Clooney, Adam Sandler dropping names, and Lipa Schmeltzer doing his thing. But, a viewer might fairly complain, we still don’t have any better sense of what this holiday is all…

Seventh Night Yid Vid: A Little Bit of Lipa

Ain’t no Hanukkah song like a Hanukkah song sung by Hasidic pop giant Lipa Schmeltzer (alas, it’s only a promo, so it gets cut off a little abruptly): Sure, Lipa may not top the pop charts like Hasidic reggae phenom Matisyahu. But Matisyahu isn’t nearly as much zany fun. (Exhibit A: Check Lipa out promoting…

Sixth Night Yid Vid: When the Zohan Named Names

Before “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” there was the “Chanukah Song”: And here’s his “Chanukah Song,” version 3.0: It should be noted that, while some maintain that the “Chanukah song” is the “single most important Jewish song of the past quarter-century,” Adam Sandler doesn’t necessarily bring academic precision to his song-writing.

Fifth Night Yid Vid: George Clooney vs. Richard Kind on the December Dilemma