Hanukkah, I learned while attending a liberal Hebrew school in the 1970s, became an important Jewish holiday only in order to compete with Christmas. My teachers and, I imagine, many others said this with a mixture of sneer and pity: It was embarrassing for external forces to drive Jewish practice.
In her thought-provoking “Hanukkah in America,” Dianne Ashton, a professor at Rowan University, takes a different, almost subversive tack. The subtext of Ashton’s book boils down to this: If keeping Jews away from the lure of Christmas was the main reason to promote Hanukkah, what’s wrong with that? Unlike Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are more sacred, their rituals more rooted in the Torah, Hanukkah could easily be redesigned for the American Jewish masses. The mainstream movements, Zionists, socialists, eco-Jews and Hasidim, all could (and did) find ways to tailor the holiday for them.
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