RASHI, RAMBAM and RAMALAMADINGDONG

Chanukkah started last night with the lighting of the first candle. Celebrants are playing dreidel, eating latkes and sufganiyot, and singing traditional songs such as Chanukkah O Chanukkah and Maoz Tsur. But there are many other ways to celebrate the holiday, including attending concerts such as “The 8 Nights of Hanukkah” with Yo La Tengo at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin’s “Hanukkah Sessions” at Largo in Los Angeles, and “The Matzo Ball” at the historic 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi featuring Meryl Zimmerman & the Miracles. A company in Jerusalem is offering a different type of Chanukkah celebration experience. Participants get the opportunity to creatively re-enact the Maccabean battle against the Greeks in what unusual way?

A. Eat and Meet Jerusalem, which offers cooking classes throughout the year, will be sponsoring a special Chanukkah cook-off for groups of up to 10 people. Participants will be divided into two teams, Judah’s Maccabees and Antiochus’s Greeks. The Maccabees will be taught to make traditional Chanukkah recipes, including latkes, bunelos (a traditional Sephardic treat of fried dough balls topped with orange glaze), keftes de prasa (fried leek patties that are traditional for Spanish Jews), and cassola (a baked ricotta cheesecake popular among Italian Jews). The Greeks will prepare tomatokeftedes (tomato fritters), baklava, kolokithokeftedes (fried zucchini balls), and kataifi (almond syrup pastries).

B. Falcon Laser Tag will set up a special Chanukkah competition for participants in a parking lot, inside a building, or in a public park for a laser tag battle between the forces of good and evil. You can also hold your laser tag event in the Engineering Corps Museum – only a 7 minute drive from Latrun, where Judah and the Maccabees prepared for battle against the Greeks.

C. Beitar Jerusalem, one of Israel’s premier soccer teams, is sponsoring amateur soccer games at their home field, Teddy Stadium. Families and friends can make up teams of 15-20 to be randomly assigned as Beitar Maccabees and Beitar Seleucids. The Maccabees use the Beitar Jerusalem locker room and the Seleucids use the visitor’s locker room, and everyone receives a soccer jersey with their team name. Beitar Jerusalem team members volunteer as coaches during the Chanukkah tournament, and all proceeds go to support youth soccer leagues throughout Israel.

D. Jerusalem Paintball is offering special Chanukkah paintball wars between the Maccabees and the Seleucids at its outdoor space in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. The Maccabees are given blue paint balls, symbolic of the Jewish people, while the Seleucid team will fire red paint balls. But the Maccabee players are also given oil-filled balls, symbolic of the oil in the Temple which lasted eight days.

E. In an event sponsored by the creators of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, participants sign up for Toula and Motel’s Big Fat Sunrise Sunset Greek Jewish Wedding. Attendees are divided into two groups–the Jews and the Greeks, and one member of each team is selected to participate in a wedding ceremony. All of the Jews then object to the intermarriage with a Greek (a la Tevye), and all of the Greeks object to the intermarriage with a Jew (a la Gus), with everyone agreeing that the marriage won’t last a day. But in a Chanukkah miracle, the marriage actually lasts 8 days.

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Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Israeli far right-wing Otzma Yehudit party, is set to become the Minister of Israeli Security in the new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir is a very controversial figure. He was a follower of Meir Kahane and an advocate for removing Arabs from the West Bank. Ben-Gvir hung a picture on his living room wall of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist who murdered 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994. He only took the picture down after entering politics in 2020, saying, “I’m declaring that for the sake of unity and a right-wing victory in the elections, I’m removing the photograph in my living room.” The Ministry of Israeli Security is an expanded version of the current Ministry of Internal Security, with increased authority over border police in the occupied territories. Given Ben-Gvir’s radical right-wing beliefs and statements about Arabs, many in Israel and worldwide Jewry are fearful of the steps he may take in that position. For example, Abe Foxman, former head of the ADL, recently said in response to the inclusion of Ben-Gvir in the government (along with Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right politician whom Netanyahu is appointing as finance minister), “I never thought that I would reach that point where I would say that my support of Israel is conditional...I love Israel and I want to love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism.” What else did Ben-Gvir previously do that was controversial?

Itamar Ben Gvir 1 by  דוד דנברג is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A. Two weeks before Yitchak Rabin was assassinated, Itamar Ben-Gvir stole the dog from Rabin’s yard and held it up, saying “We got to his dog, and we’ll get to him, too.”

B. Two weeks before Yitchak Rabin was assassinated, Itamar Ben-Gvir broke the hood ornament off of Rabin’s car and held it up, saying “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.”

C. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke, Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated with a bar-b-q and stated, “We are, of course, happy. We hope there is a message here to everyone who wants to harm the land of Israel: the land of Israel is more powerful than all of you.”

D. Two weeks before Yitchak Rabin was assassinated, Itamar Ben-Gvir stole Rabin’s Nobel Peace Prize from his office and held it up, saying “He doesn't deserve a peace prize, he deserves a death prize.”

E. Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a picture of himself holding a brick and wrote, “I praise the Big Bad Wolf for blowing down the straw and stick houses of those unkosher pigs. But he failed to blow down the third pig’s brick house, so we got to the bricks, and we’ll get to those treif pigs, too.”

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The city of Buffalo, New York was buried under record snowfall this past week, with some areas receiving more than 6 feet of snow. The first Jew known to reside in the Buffalo area was Captain Mordecai Myers, who was stationed at the Williamsville cantonment during the War of 1812. The Jewish population grew through the 1800’s, with the first synagogue established in 1847. There are presently more than a dozen synagogues serving the Jewish population of approximately 12,000. The most famous member of the Jewish community was Mordecai Manuel Noah, who purchased land at Grand Island in the Niagara River to establish a Jewish homeland, one of the earliest Zionist endeavors. On September 2, 1825, Noah led a procession of Masons, militia members, municipal leaders, Seneca Chief Red Jacket, thousands of Christians, and a few Jews, to a ceremony at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where he presented a cornerstone declaring “ARARAT, A City of Refuge for the Jews, Founded by Mordecai Manuel Noah in the month of Tizri 5586, Sept. 1825 and in the 50th Year of American Independence.” Noah called on every Jew in the world to be taxed “three sheckels of silver” to support the government of the Jewish Nation. His plan failed to attract any interest in the Jewish world, however, and the cornerstone now sits in the Buffalo Historical Society. Noah went on to great success in a very varied career–he served as a sheriff in New York, was a founder of New York University, wrote plays, was behind the establishment of New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, published the Sunday Times and other newspapers, was a leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, and more. What else is Mordecai Manuel Noah known for?

Mordecai Manuel Noah is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A. Noah was one of the founders, in 1845, of Temple Emanu-El on the Lower East Side of New York. Though Noah was not an ordained rabbi, he served as the congregation’s religious leader for its first 5 years until the congregation expanded and hired its first rabbi, Leo Merzbacher, in 1850.

B. Noah was a prominent abolitionist, saying of slavery, “How can Americans be engaged in this traffic [the slave trade], men whose birthright is liberty, whose eminent peculiarity is freedom?”

C. Noah wrote a book entitled Ararat and the Jewish Enterprise, where he continued to advocate for a Jewish homeland despite the failure of his efforts on the island near Buffalo. His book was a primary inspiration to Theodor Herzl, who spoke about it in great detail at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.

D. Noah wrote critical reviews of the plays and performers at New York’s African Grove Theatre, a theater whose company and crew were all Black. Noah demeaned the actors in racist terms and questioned their intelligence, as evidenced by the following quote: “People of colour generally are very imitative, quick in their conceptions and rapid in execution; but it is in the lighter pursuits requiring no intensity of thought or depth of reflection.”

E. Noah established the first kosher slaughterhouse in Buffalo, which specialized in the kosher slaughtering of buffalo, and he owned a kosher deli specializing in kosher Buffalo wings.

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Theater productions have led to criticism and protest from the Jewish community for centuries, going back at least to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice. But the Jewish contribution to the theater world has been significant, especially in musical theater, which has been dominated by such lyricists and composers as Oscar Hammerstein II, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerry Herman, Alan Menken, and Stephen Sondheim. And Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Tevye the milkman and his family’s and community’s attempts to maintain their Jewish ways in Czarist Russia is one of the most widely produced musical theater productions of all. Meanwhile, last year in London, the Royal Court Theatre apologized following criticism of their production of Rare Earth Mettle, a show about a billionaire who was attempting to monopolize the earth’s resources. The character’s original name was Hershel Fink, but after complaints that this was an antisemitic stereotype, the character’s name was changed to Henry Finn. And last month in London, The Icarus Theatre Collective canceled a planned production of a show because of criticism from the Jewish community. What was the controversy about?

Shylock (Twelve Characters from Shakespeare) is in the public domain, under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) via Wikimedia Commons

A. The Icarus Theatre Collective was preparing a version of West Side Story where instead of a romantic relationship between the Italian Tony and the Puerto Rican Maria, the ill-fated relationship would be between Leora, an Israeli girl, and a Palestinian boy, Asif. Though the producers of the show reached out to local Israeli and Palestinian community members for their input and support as they developed the show, a critical article appeared in a local Jewish newspaper which provoked protests, and that was followed by protests from the local Muslim community as well. Producers shelved the production out of fear for the safety of the actors and employees of the theater.

B. The company had planned to produce a version of Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues were Nazis, with Romeo being a member of the Hitler Youth Movement, while Juliet and the Capulets were part of the Jewish community. After much criticism the company apologized and canceled the production while noting that, unlike in the original production where the Montagues and the Capulets were “Two households, both alike in dignity,” their production would have shown the “Nazi” Montagues as the bad guys.

C. The company had planned to produce a version of Romeo and Juliet where Romeo would be portrayed as a member of the Hitler Youth Movement and Juliet was part of the Jewish community. The company was criticized because the casting notice did not specify that they were looking for a Jewish actress to play the Juliet part. The theater management canceled the production and issued an apology noting that the casting announcement was supposed to specify a preference for a Jewish actress, but that “Our casting director removed key information and we failed to notice.”

D. The producers announced plans to mount a new production of The Diary of Anne Frank where the people living in the attic were members of the Roma community rather than Jews. The theater's artistic director stated that “the Anne Frank story is ultimately a story about all of us who have fallen victim to hate. We hope to share that message by hearing from the Roma girl Analetta instead of the Jewish Anne.” However, protests arose within the Jewish community, with one rabbi arguing that “while the story of Roma persecution by the Nazis is an important one, it is not acceptable to replace the Jewish Holocaust story with this other narrative.” As a result the theater company canceled the production and instead produced the classic show The Glass Menagerie.

E. The theater group was in the process of staging a musical production of a show based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma. The new version took place in Germany in the 1930’s, rather than Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century. One plot line changed the focus of the core community conflict, with a song’s revised lyrics stating “Oh the Nazis and the Hebrews should be friends.”

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