And it’ll take just one listen to become hooked on Kosha Dillz and Nissim Black’s remix of Adam Sandler’s satirical classic. Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” is an American Jewish staple. Kosha and Nissim’s rendition give it the respectful nod it deserves for its cultural impact while elevating the piece into a perfectly-fit 2021 repackaging.

Essentially, it slaps. And “The Hanukkah Song 2.0” is the newest addition to our holiday playlist A Jewcy, Jewcy Hanukkah because it deserves the kavod.

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Imagine a bunch of angry Jewish men in the same place, at the same time. Is it a daily morning minyan at a dying Conservative synagogue? Or is it a Noah Baumbach film? Yep, it’s the second one. The trailer is just out for The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), the writer-director’s latest project, fresh off of Cannes.

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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Back in elementary school, “The Chanukah Song” made being Jewish a littler cooler. At first, when your classmates bragged about Easter egg hunts and super-cool presents from Santa, you didn’t have an obvious trump card. But then, thanks to Adam Sandler, you got what you needed to show off on the playground.

Today, over a decade since Sandler’s tune reigned supreme, Haim, our favorite singing sisters, have brought back the jam with their rock and roll cover. Share with your friends, and remind them how cool Hanukkah can be.

Now that we’re feeling juvenile, take the time machine back to yesteryears and listen to Stan and Judy’s Kid alone in your bedroom. Ah, nostalgia.

Listen: Haim’s take on Adam Sandler’s ‘Chanukah Song’ [JTA]

Previous: Spotlight on the Band Haim: Three Jewish Sisters Who Rock

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So, Andy Samberg is officially off the market, taken by the wonderfully talented Joanna Newsom. For those of us who had creepily seen ourselves getting married to Samberg in what would surely be a long, laughter-filled fantasy marriage, this is quite the blow. But to lift our spirits (we’re all in this together) we have a great clip of Samberg impersonating one of his wedding guests, the great Adam Sandler, who came dressed up as Donny from That’s My Boy, which was probably way funnier in person than it was on screen.

Mazel tov, you guys!

(Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty)

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• Gay parents on Israeli TV shows: so hot right now. [NYT]

• An Italian artist’s statue of Hitler praying, currently on display in the Warsaw Ghetto, has offended a whole bunch of people. [NY Daily News]

• Ariel Kaminer’s moving tribute to the late David Rakoff. [NYT]

• Alison Brie is Captain America. [BuzzFeed]

• Tel Aviv is going Wi-Fi, people [JTA]

• Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow were roommates:

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Accompanied by Paul Shaffer, Sandler’s parody included references to bed bugs, Anthony Weiner, and Bloomberg’s soda ban, while staying remarkably truthful to the song’s structure: “The puke on your stoops every Sunday morn, Times Square losing all its porn, Original Ray’s Pizza closing to ya. But Hallelujah, Sandy screw ya, we’ll get through ya.”

Liel Leibovitz, who spent the last two years writing a book about Leonard Cohen, argues in The Scroll that Sandler’s version—raunchy and humorous as it may have been—actually restored a sense of soulfulness and authenticity to Cohen’s masterpiece that had been lost in the countless, mindless covers we’ve been subjected to over the years. Leibovitz writes:

To most Cohen aficionados, Sandler’s performance was, at best, an act of mindless vulgarity, or, if you wanted to take a less charitable view, sacrilege. I understand why the critics, including many of my dearest friends, feel that way. To hear Cohen’s elevated words about the yearnings of the spirit and the flesh reduced to jokes about Mark Sanchez fumbling into someone’s butt is enough to send even the kindest soul into paroxysms of rage. But the condemners, I believe, are missing the point: Sandler wasn’t covering Cohen’s song as much as he was covering the cascade of covers of “Hallelujah,” virtually all of which had robbed the song of its might in much more vulgar ways.

So does this mean we won’t have to hear Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” at every Hanukkah party we go to anymore?

In Defense of Sandler’s “Hallelujah” [The Scroll]

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It looks like anti-Semitic Elmo—last seen getting arrested in Times Square last month—has headed out West, seeking greener pastures and fatter wallets. According to Michael Wilson, a writer for the New York Times’ City Room blog, the 48-year-old former pornographer was spotted at a San Francisco playground, then sent Wilson a bizarre email saying he was posted up at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, making bank:

“Why?” he wrote. “I am the only cartoon character.”

As if to drive the point home, he attached a picture of a pile of cash beside plates of sushi. “Feasting on sashimi,” he wrote.

Watch out, Los Angeles—he’s headed to you next.

Ranting Elmo Finds Prosperity Out West [New York Times]
Previously: Anti-Semitic Elmo is Back—He Got Arrested in Times Square Today
Why Anti-Semitic Elmo is Creepier—and Less Funny—Than We Had Thought
The Growing Anti-Semitic Elmo Crisis

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I want to get close to Laney, to hear her say my name slo-wly. She is petite but taut-bodied in a yellow sundress, fabric so invitingly thin and wispy I wonder if I could blow it off her torso with a well-timed breath. She is telling me her fingers tremble when she drinks coffee, and that is why she has tiny green glops on the skin between the toenails she’s painted. Her small blue eyes twinkle, and I hold her gaze as if I’m spinning plates on my index finger: the longer I do it, the more likely she might be to applaud, take my hand, and invite me to rest my palm on the small of her back.

“Have you ever eaten at Belle Luna?” she asks me as we stroll the streets of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve just eaten crepes at a French café: it’s our first date. “Nope,” I say, walking a little behind her to admire her bronzed legs. “Have you ever had a drink at Sapphire?” she asks. “No, but I’d like to, sometime,” I say. “Have you ever gone inside Sterchi Lofts?” “Well,” I say, laughing. “What?” she asks. “No,” I say, “I haven’t been there either.”

Outside of us both being law students and laughing at Will Ferrell movies, Laney and I don’t have much in common: it’s not just that we haven’t frequented the same bars or restaurants; it’s that we don’t like to visit the same regions of human experience. I love reading novels; she doesn’t care for them. She loves shopping; I get headaches at T.J. Maxx. But she’s a sweet girl, and that body…

I sit her on a bench and tell her I can read palms—“because my parents are Russian”—and she either buys my line of reasoning (Russian parents = metaphysical insight) or she accepts that I’m inventing a way to get my hands on hers. I disclose to her a future of three children, a husband, and good health. “Cool,” she says. “Oh, did you see the Christmas lights all along this street last year?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They were really cool.”

“Did you decorate your house for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

“What?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Seriously?” Laney registers my Jewishness with a squirrely wiggle of her nose.

“Yep,” I say. “So no Christmas.”

“Are you joking?”

I laugh aloud. “Why would I joke about that?”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Have you ever met a Jewish person before?”

Laney is from a tiny Tennessee town where controversy can break out if a Baptist considers going to a Methodist church. She thinks to herself and answers no, she’s never met a Jew before. “Do you go to church?”

“Sometimes I go to synagogue.”

“Is that Jewish church?”

“Basically, but it’s called synagogue. Sometimes I’ll go on Friday nights.”

“So you don’t go to Jewish church all the time?”

“Synagogue,” I say.

“Oh, sorry!” she says. “Do you eat special foods?”

And that’s when it hit me: I, a man who has never fasted on Yom Kippur, who has not read the Torah since his bar mitzvah, and who has eaten pork and assorted trayf by the boatload throughout his life, is to be the Spokesman of the Jews for an inquisitive girl from Small Town, Tennessee. Her curiosities and judgments about the whole of the Jewish people will likely be filtered through me in the future; me, the first Jew she’s ever known. I feel underqualified for the job and eerily aware of its weight: I can picture Laney at a dinner party, maybe five years from now, and the talk shifting to something or other related to Jews and Laney saying, “Ya’ll, I know one.”

In my life, I have been cocooned: I went to Jewish Sunday school until my bar mitzvah, I went to a private high school that, while not predominantly Jewish, had its fair share of them, and then I attended a university with a largely Jewish student body. Though I lived in places where Jews were the minority, I had never before been put into a position where I was to be quizzed (in the nicest possible way, of course, because Laney’s smile was very nice) about my faith, identity, culture, and religion. I even feel presumptuous using the possessive “my”: who I am to feign expertise on such a rich, complicated people, for the very word Jew unfurls into thousands of connotations depending on what books you read, who you talk to, and what you experience.

“Some people eat special foods,” I tell Laney. “Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

“Well, you can’t eat pork…and certain foods have to be treated a certain way.”

God. It was as if I’d sped-read Judaism for Dummies.

Even though I tell Laney that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are more significant in the Jewish calendar, Laney wants to know about Hanukkah. “Is it like Christmas?” she asks.

My Sunday school education, long warehoused and growing musty with disuse, was suddenly called upon. I deliver what I know in fragments: the story of the noble Maccabee warriors, how they thought they had oil to help them survive one cold night, only to discover that the oil, miraculously, would last them eight. “So that’s why we light the candles on eight nights,” I tell Laney. “On this candelabra-looking thing.” I forget to tell her the candelabra-looking thing is called a menorah. “Have you ever eaten potato pancakes?”

“No…” she says, as if she thinks I might offer her one from my pocket.

I am lucky Laney is asking me about Hanukkah, because if she had asked me a broader question like, “What is a Jew?”, I would be flummoxed. The History of the Jews: a history of faith and strength and perseverance over oppression, of tradition and literature and art and family and. And and and. I wasn’t getting to the ands: I was only talking about Hanukkah. But then again, what else could I tell her if she did ask? Where would I start?

Talking about some of the basics of Judaism made me keenly aware of the scattershot knowledge I had of my own Jewish identity, and how difficult it would be for me to explain to a person who had no familiarity with it. My Jewishness has been passed down from my parents, Russian Jews who came to the United States as political refugees in 1979. On their Soviet passports, their nationality was listed not as RUSSIAN, but as JEW. They fled to America for the reasons so many flee: opportunity, freedom, both economic and religious.

In my family, I was a first-generation American Jew, born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Memphis, Tennessee on the soothing storyteller sermons of my Reform rabbi and the sing-song cadence of my cantor. However, my day-to-day Jewishness, especially past my bar mitzvah, was molded more by cultural than religious forces: Jerry Seinfeld’s nasal twang, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.”

Hanukkah again. “The potato pancakes are called latkes,” I tell Laney.

I don’t ask Laney if she’s ever heard of Moshe Dayan or Philip Roth or Larry David. I don’t try to present and flatten the contusions of the word Jew itself: is it a signifier of identity? Race? Religion? Culture? All of the above? How much do such distinctions matter when, in the dark pages of history, those who hate don’t care if you’re Orthodox or Reform or Conservative or culturally Jewish, or a Jew for Jesus, or an atheist Jew, or a Jewish Neurotic. For those who hate them, a Jew is a Jew—period. And while many Jews may be reluctant to define their people, even in defiant pride, with the same vocabulary that their enemies use, I am reminded of an Israeli speaker who hated the word “Jewish.” “Why,” he said to me and my fellow Birthright trip travelers in a hotel conference room in Jerusalem, “are you Jew…ISH?” He stressed the palms-raised-in-the-air nebbishness of the ISH. “No, you’re not Jewish,” he scolded us. “You can’t ish your way out of our family. You’re a JEW!”

I am a Jew. This is what I had told Laney, the shiksa goddess from the Tennessee country, and she had asked me if I was kidding. If I had been kidding, what was the joke? What was its set-up, its punchline? What comic ammunition would I have gotten out of pretending to be a Jew?

With the fearlessness of an Israeli commando and the calm dignity of Moses, I ask Laney, “How would your dad feel if you, say, married a Jew?”

She turns her pillowy lips to me. “I think he’d be okay,” she says. “But he’d be mad if I married a black guy.”

Oy.

(image via Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
Did My Commitment to Dating Only Jews Make Me a Racist?

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After several troubling incidents this summer, it looks like anti-Semitic Elmo is back. The New York Times City Room blog reports:

The man, Adam Sandler, 48, who in June was removed from Central Park in an ambulance after going on a rant, was arrested in front of the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square shortly after 3 p.m., the police said. He was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Mr. Sandler was shouting and drawing a crowd that was blocking traffic, and he refused to leave, the police said.

A sad continuation of a creepy story.

Previously: Why Anti-Semitic Elmo is Creepier—and Less Funny—Than We Had Thought
The Growing Anti-Semitic Elmo Crisis

(image via Reuters)

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VIRGO (AUGUST 21-SEPTEMBER 20): An einredenish iz erger vi a krenk: An imaginary illness is worse than a real one.

Practical, dependable, modest, graceful and extremely reserved, Virgo is characterized by the Virgin Maiden, as well as the bird (like all mutable signs, Virgo is “double-bodied”—adaptable and dualistic). As such, your powers of eloquence, composure, precision and tact are to be lauded. However, you are often overly-critical and can strain yourself with your vigilance and inflexiblity—you work hard so that your calm exterior never betrays your anxious interior, and this disconnect can lead to frayed nerves.

Virgos are ruled by the belly and intestines (Kishka). You operate via gut reaction rather than psychic intuition. You thrive when you are solving problems, creating order out of chaos, and otherwise exercising your brain muscles. Your nervousness, however, when unchecked, can lead to hypochondria and extreme anxiety. Obsessed with hygiene and organization, you often bottle up for feelings—feelings are not, after all, very clean and orderly.

With the New Moon in your sign on September 16 (Rosh Hashanah), and a Full (Blue) Moon in Aries on the 30th (Sukkot), and Yom Kippur in between, you may find particular significance in the tashlich ceremony—how very Virgo to systematically cast off your sins to make a clean slate for the New Year!

Famous Virgo Jews: Peter Falk, Leonard Bernstein, Adam Sandler, Alan Dershowitz, Dr. Drew, Gene Simmons, Dorothy Parker (half-Jewish), Sid Caesar, Pink (half-Jewish), Stephen Fry (half-Jewish), Max Greenfield, Lewis Black, Gwyneth Paltrow (half-Jewish)

LIBRA (SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 20): It’s healthy to question whether you are getting what you want out of life, but dangerous to assume that the path not taken was the right one. Let life unfold naturally—you’ve been warned!

SCORPIO (OCTOBER 21-NOVEMBER 20): 
Your ruling planet Pluto turns direct on September 18, allowing your subconscious to take a break. Stop ignoring your deepest desires and focusing only on getting through the day, and you’ll gain control of your life (and probably prevent some gray hairs).

SAGITTARIUS (NOVEMBER 21-DECEMBER 20): Resentment can build up, preventing you from seeing things for what they are. The New Year will usher in good tidings, allowing you to see with clarity that the decisions you make in life are what shapes it—and you.

CAPRICORN (DECEMBER 21-JANUARY 20): Capricorns are the Vulcans of the Zodiac. It’s not that you don’t have feelings, but you play your cards too close to your chest, guarding yourself against anything impractical. You’ve got so much going on inside of you that it would be a crime not to express yourself! New Year, New You!

AQUARIUS (JANUARY 21-FEBRUARY 20): Pay extra attention this Yom Kippur—your innate indifference can blind you to your own foibles. Once you open up to the possibility that some of this may be your doing, you’ll be more conscious of how to fix it.

PISCES (FEBRUARY 21-MARCH 20): You adorable luftmensh, you! The retrograde triple threat in the slow moving planets makes your psychic abilities so keen that it may be painful. Use this time to sift through these psychic energies, and you’ll begin to reap what you’ve sown throughout the year.

ARIES (MARCH 21-APRIL 20): Rosh Hashanah literally means “the head of the year”—and Aries heads the zodiac in Western astrology. Brandish your shofar and hark the herald! You may be the bold brazen ram, but think about relinquishing some of your control. There’s plenty of time to bemoan a bad fortune once it arrives.

TAURUS (APRIL 21- MAY 20): Surround yourself with people you trust and be direct with what you need from others. They’ll be more willing to help if you know what you want and aren’t afraid to ask for it. True love will come when the time is right. Until it does, remember this: you better work!

GEMINI (MAY 21- JUNE 20): Although Mental Mercury makes you a bit of a macher, you’d better give up on your scheme to harness time. That’s never going to happen. Your versatility and inquisitive nature make you a perfect candidate for embracing the energies of the universe and working with them, not against them.

CANCER (JUNE 21-JULY 20): Sages have said it is unwise to speculate on the unknowable, and for many Cancers this includes other people. You ought to exercise your empathy muscles and cast your sins of dogmatic prejudice into the river of new beginnings—you’ll be surprised by how much others want to include you in their lives.

LEO (JULY 21-AUGUST 20): For this you went to college? Although you may feel you are about to burst from the fear that you’ll never move beyond your current circumstances, it’s time to put up or shut up—tokhis oyfn tish. Big changes this month beseech you to keep your eyes on the prize, you Lucky Leo.

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