https://nypost.com/2020/12/09/why-the-cultural-elite-truly-despises-hanukkah/
Our cultural elites’ least favorite Jewish holiday has arrived: Hanukkah, of course.
Why did Hanukkah irk everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens, who memorably derided it as a “celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness,” to author Sarah Prager, who took to the pages of The New York Times recently to explain that she won’t be teaching her kids about it?
Well, because Hanukkah is about as out of step with the contemporary elite consensus as any religious tradition can be.
If you haven’t reviewed the story in a while, here’s how it goes. One fine day in 167 BC, a crowd of Jews was gathered in the town square of Modi’in, a suburb of Jerusalem.
They were there because the Seleucid Empire — the successors of Alexander the Great’s expansive dynasty — had recently moved into town. The conquerors believed that their Greek culture was the only path to enlightenment. The Seleucids had resolved to Hellenize this peculiarly stubborn people, the Jews, and they sought out the right kind of Jewish collaborator — you know, those who weren’t too bearded or too weird — to persuade the rest of the locals to abandon their backward mountain God and primitive laws.
And then, just as one of those Hellenizing Jews stepped up to sacrifice to almighty Zeus, out came a priest named Mattathias. Having precisely zero patience for idolatry, the fiery-eyed zealot killed not only the Jewish collaborator but the Seleucid governor, as well. Mattathias thus launched a war — partly an internal Jewish conflict, partly a rebellion against Greek imperial power — that would end with that well-publicized victory of the priest and his sons, the Maccabees, aided by one miraculous vat of oil.
So what’s Hanukkah truly about?
