Dianne Ashton’s new history of Hanukkah in America had particular poignance this holiday season. Standing in an Upper West Side Starbucks line in late November, I overheard a young girl wearing ballet slippers tell her friend that there would be no dance class the following week. With all the gravitas of a Yom Kippur sermon, she explained that it was Thanksgivvukkah. Her mother guffawed. “Thanksgivvukkah!” she muttered, as though it were some newfangled, Madison Avenue-engineered, combo-pack of holidays that had as much business joining forces as the birth of Christ and the victory of the Maccabees.
The truth is that Jews have been busy transforming Hanukkah since its inception. There’s a reason — beyond the consistency of latke batter — that Ashton calls it an “easy to mold” holiday. Today, scholars believe that Hanukkah originated as a belated celebration of the harvest festivals of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret, delayed until the Maccabees retook the Temple. But the rabbis put their own spin on this holiday’s significance.
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