Hanukkah begins on December 12 this year. That is, Chanukah begins on December 12 this year. We light the menorah (or is it the hanukkiah?) and celebrate — oil. Lasting, high-quality lamp oil. Can that be right? If you don’t know your Hasmoneans from your Seleucids, read on. After all, a great miracle happened here!…
The more Ilan Rosenberg pondered the Chanukkah story, the more the Hollywood stunt performer came up with one explanation for how a group of Jewish guerilla fighters beat the much larger Greek army. Maybe the Maccabees had possessed superhuman powers. Drawing on his stunt experience for movies such as “300” and “Pompeii,” and his Krav…
Dear friends, winter is coming. And with the cold wind comes the war on Hanukkah. It’s real, and it’s Santa shaped. When Jennie Rivlin Roberts, owner of , ordered these cute maccabees made out of chocolate — the very same chocolate used to make their seasonal gelt coins — to sell to her Jewish customers,…
Billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s new campus operation to defend Israel has picked David Brog, the head of the largest Christian Zionist organization, as its first leader. Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, will head the Campus Maccabees, a new multi-million dollar group funded by Adelson and fellow billionaire Haim Saban. The new organization’s mission…
Hanukkah and Thanksgiving occur at the same time this year. This won’t happen again for another 79,043 years, according to calculations by Jonathan Mizrahi, a quantum physicist at the Sandia National Laboratories. Many are asking what the connection is between these two holidays. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert even did a spoof on it. On a…
Moshe Waldmann has sent me an email about my July 20 column dealing with how Yiddish sometimes uses different words when referring to Jews as opposed to gentiles. One example given there was the verb mekaber zayn, to “bury” (from Hebrew kavar), which is reserved by Yiddish for Jews, and Mr. Waldmann wonders whether this…
100% of profits support our journalism
