Chanukkah and Jewish culture
a thought on חנוכה and Jewish culture As Malka Simkovich discussed in her recent Lehrhaus article, we often frame Hanukkah as being a clash between Jews and Greeks, between Jewish and Greek culture which are portrayed as mutually exclusive while the historical reality is more complex given the Jewish embrace of aspects of Hellenism and Hellenistic influences on the later Hasmonean kings. Over the weekend, I read David Fishman's new book "The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis". the book follows members of the Jewish intellectual community in Vilna who were forced by the Nazis to catalog and sort Jewish material for use in Nazi institutes for the study of the Jewish question as part of the philosophy of "Jewish studies without Jews." these individuals undertook to smuggle material they were supposed to be sorting back in the Vilna ghetto and hide it to ensure that even if Vilna Jewish and its institution...