Rihannukah may be an obvious pun but that doesn’t make it any less amazing when Drake raps about them both on SNL and makes them rhyme, or when you can buy greeting cards with the mashup.

But now, elevating what could be a one-off pun to its next level, Amy Schiller, the creator of the Beyonceder brings you another pop diva Jewish holiday with Rihannukah memes.

Enjoy a few examples, with RiRi lyrics in the context of the Festival of Lights:

And of course, this calls for a revisit of Schiller’s OG meme project, “Hey Girl Happy Hannukah,” in which Ryan Gosling seductively invites you to celebrate Chanukah (and other Jewish festivals).

For example:

Happy Chanukah. And Beyoncé bless us, every one.

Images courtesy Amy Schiller

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Chanukah is a great holiday for kids. Games, fried foods, lighting candles— add in the Americanization of the holiday with gifts, and it’s an easy favorite.

Plus, there’s the simple narrative of the holiday— the dual miracles of the impossible war, and the oil that burned for eight days. But there’s lots we don’t bother to tell kids about the holiday, that, I have learned, really piques their attention. Use your best judgment— don’t tell a kindergartener about a man being crushed to death, for example. And some of the fascinating geopolitics might be a bit sophisticated for even the most precocious of tykes. But here are some great ways to make a Jewish child question their entire holiday experience up to this point:

1. The story really starts with Alexander the Great.

OK, you do need a kid nerdy enough to appreciate the historical connection, but if they’re Jewish, the odds aren’t necessarily against you. The villain of our story after all, Antiochus, was really Antiochus the IV. The kids almost certainly won’t know how the Seleucids came to be in possession of ancient Judea— when Alexander’s generals divided up their late leader’s empire like it was a giant cake.

2. Judah the Maccabee died during the War. In fact, most of the brothers died.

Our heroes are the sons of the priest Mattathias, especially the middle of the five— Judah. What we don’t bother to tell kids is that Judah didn’t live to see the end of the war, after walking into a bloodbath rather retreating. Watch their eyes grow wide as you break it to them. And he was far from the only core member of the gang to die, which brings us to:

3. One word: Eleazer.

Judah’s brother Eleazar had a notoriously sticky end. In battle, the Syrian-Greeks brought out elephants, because if you had an elephant, wouldn’t you? Anyway, Eleazar charged the elephant, spearing it in the stomach. What happened next in retrospect was sort of obvious; the dying elephant fell up Eleazar, killing him.

The best part? The Jews didn’t even win that battle.

4. The post-victory government imploded pretty much immediately.

We tell kids proudly how the Maccabees won the day and ejected Seleucid rule. We usually end the story right there. Admit to the child in your life that attempts to create a stable government in the aftermath of the war lasted like 70 years and then collapsed in a heap when the corrupt monarchy ended in everyone assassinating one another like it was Game of Thrones. (Why is a kid watching Game of Thrones!?) Don’t worry kids, you still get gelt.

5. Chanukah is pretty much Sukkot.

Listen, you don’t need to tell a kid that the miracle of the oil “may not have happened,” unless you want to have a huge conversation about the evolution of Judaism and the way we create and then codify faith-based narratives. But you can also gently point out that Chanukah is the same length as Sukkot— the Maccabees were fighting so long and hard for the Temple that they had to put off the High Holy Day’s celebration until the winter. What will they do with this information? That’s up to their tiny little minds.

6. Giving Chanukah presents is only because of Christmas envy.

Sorry, kids. We know you want to insist to your gentile friends that Chanukah is just as good as Christmas, but the presents you so covet are because your great-grandparent immigrants saw the Macy’s holiday windows one too many times and snapped. Back in the old country, you would get a kopek and a potato, and be grateful.

And so, blow a child’s mind this holiday season! Let us know how it goes, and you’re welcome.

Image: Gustave Doré’s “The Death of Eleazar” via Wikimedia.

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Chanukah has always been regarded as a holiday about resistance. So in these #metoo times of women speaking truth to power, you can make sure your celebration includes the story of a courageous woman rising up to defeat a fearsome enemy. The Book of Judith is coming back.

In this story, the ancient people of Bethulia block the path to Jerusalem of an invading Seleucid army. Furious, the bloodthirsty General Holofernes lays siege. As water supplies dwindle and infants and elders fall sick, the starving population prepares to surrender.

Enter our badass hero, a childless widow with a bold plan. Judith convinces the Bethulians to give her a few days to save the city. She uses her last drops of water to bathe and dresses in her finest robes. She laces up her sandals to show off her smooth ankles and heads down the mountain to the enemy camp. She convinces Holofernes that she has information critical to his success and will betray her people because they are no longer following their strict religious diet. (OK, they are starving to death and trying to survive, but luckily Holofernes isn’t up to date on his Torah studies.) Holofernes and his men are a little nervous about the strange Hebrew God who, rumor has it, sent plagues down on the Egyptians, so they welcome Judith as a turncoat. They even throw her a party.

At the bacchanal, Judith shares her goat cheese with the general, a salty snack that leaves him thirsty. When she gets him alone in his bedroom (she wore those sexy sandals for a reason) she plies him with wine until he passes out drunk. She then uses his own sword to cut off his head, which she carries back up to Bethulia in her cheese basket. Judith’s success inspires her people, who rally to chase off the invaders. The story of Judith is sung throughout Judea, encouraging her relatives, the Maccabees, to rise up against their oppressors. But we all know that part of the story.

Judith’s cunning and bravery has been resurrected throughout history as a symbol of the weak challenging authority. An iconic painting by Artemisia Gentileschi shows the artist herself as Judith, slashing the head off of a Holofernes that resembles Gentileschi’s rapist. In Florence, a statue by Donatello bears the inscription “Behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility,” referring to Medici rule. One of the Chanukah lamps decorated by a triumphant Judith is said to represent Empress Maria Theresa of Austria standing up against Frederick the Great in 1741. The list goes on.

Some Sephardic communities have celebrated Judith for centuries. Traditionally, the seventh night of Hanukkah is reserved for, chag habanot, or Festival of the Daughters. Women study Torah, celebrate their daughters, and enjoy special treats prepared by the men. These treats are dairy based in honor of the cheese Judith used to trick Holofernes.

American Jews are now reinventing the Festival of the Daughters tradition. Why not indulge in wine and cheese one night of Hanukkah and tell her story? Why not use one of the fantastic recipes out there to make cheese latkes? Why not let the men cook and clean one night so the women can rest and tell our own stories?

And these day, with women risking everything to tell our stories, to run for office, to #resist in these crazy times, we all could use a little more courage every day. Perhaps celebrating the story of Judith at Chanukah will embolden us as we march forward into our own battles.

Melina Selverston-Scher is a writer based in San Francisco. She recently completed a historical novel based on the story of Judith and Holofernes called For You and All of Us. Her blog is: What Would Judith Do.

Gentileschi’s painting via Wikimedia.

The post This Chanukah, Fight Misogyny with Wine and Cheese appeared first on Jewcy.

After my father died we had to clear the apartment he kept his office in, and my mother started collecting old menorahs from thrift stores. I still can’t go past a window display with some old Jew’s cast-offs without wondering when that was last lit, and how.

I saw the first on top

of a book case, hiding, funereal

and black as a cenotaph

tucked behind my father’s photo.

The next was on the ledge

of the window and she showed it

– opening the tiny frame

in the heart that contained ten commandments.

The last one (recently acquired)

was stone in part, and green amethyst

(or look-alikes) bejewelled the cups

where the candles, if it were used, would be put.

Why she should collect the lamps

of the dead, who don’t light their candles,

take them home instead and light

just her own one  I could not say.

But she stands running her hands

on the candle cups. Her doctor mentioned:

“You can’t just leave them. It’s a call.”

And my mother agreed, bought a new set

and when she lights it is the first

of at least ten that gleams

in the gloom of the back room.

It’s a cold room.

I notice my father’s room;

their bedroom, where he died, a sad room.

It has light now and flowers

but still you can’t help hearing him, groaning.

She says, “There really aren’t

that many lamps in junk shops,”

as more and more Jews die

and their sons clear their house for scrap.

She says, “Only this one, and that.

You can’t leave them. In shops

You have to rescue them.” She hangs

a hand on the brass candle cup.

We take candles wherever we go

something requires that we light

before full dark – it isn’t law,

it is the need for someone else to see the match.

If you find a lamp – please do not leave it –

somehow you’ll find your way back

to when you were at home, and light was with someone

and a spark fell before dark.

Atar Hadari’s “Songs from Bialik” was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award. His Pen Translates award winning “Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin” is out from Arc Publications in January 2018.

Image via Wikimedia

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Let’s be plain: there are not many good Chanukah movies. For the children, there is the Rugrats Chanukah special. For the adults… It’s A Wonderful Life? (One can only imagine a restless Jewish station manager conspiring to schedule as the yearly Christmas viewing a movie that is 98% human misery and only 2% Christmas.) However, blessed is the Disney Channel, for from this unlikely place came one of our only modern Chanukah classics (the other, of course, being The Hebrew Hammer in all its exploitation glory), Full-Court Miracle.

Inspired partly by the true story of ex-Sixer Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who coached the girls of Akiba Hebrew Academy so his son (Kobe—you might have heard of him) could play basketball at nearby Lower Merion High, and partly by the real-life Lamont Carr, 2003’s Full-Court Miracle tells a fable of five Philly day school kids and their quest to win a local basketball tournament. There’s T.J., whose temper can only be cooled by his passion for Rebecca Bloomberg; Joker, mouthy and sardonic; Ben, the fat one; Stick, a leggy nice Jewish boy who is clearly the MVP of the movie (he’s the first to dream up that their new coach is Judah Maccabee, is endearingly bookish, and even scores the winning points with his hook shot); and Alex “Schlotz” Schlotzky, our pint-sized, basketball-obsessed hero.

When Schlotz is tired of losing to a team of the most obviously villainous opponents since the 80s, he stumbles upon a former college basketball star, Lamont Carr, who the boys believe to be a reincarnated Judah Maccabee (a classic, I know). A series of obstacles ensue and are overcome, and along the way we all learn the true meaning of Chanukah.

It’s really a miracle that this movie exists at all. Nothing else stands like it in the canon of Disney Channel Original Movies, a staple of many childhoods, with a new movie featuring snowboarding or surfing or motorbiking teens each month. (Sadly for kids today, these are released with much less frequency.)

In Full Court Miracle, there are menorahs on every surface, so you know these characters are really Jewish. The sports-fanatic rabbi has a running joke asking “is there something on your mind beside a yarmulke?” There are explanations of chukim (Lamont responds to the idea with a saying of his grandmother’s about how if we knew everything God knew, we would be God ourselves). There is a moment of tension when, at the Shabbos table, Lamont asks for a glass of milk with his chopped liver—even though, of course, he just ate chopped liver with his gefilte fish. There is a Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. (I don’t think it can be overstated how much of classic this movie is.)

On the other hand, it’s unbelievable no one made this movie before. Chanukah really is the ultimate sports movie, if you consider sports movies at their hearts to be underdog stories. Who has ever been more underdog than the Maccabees? (Think of how many Jewish sports organizations are somehow Maccabee-derived.) Full-Court Miracle merely mashes up the genres to create the optimal version of the Chanukah story. Instead of the Syrian-Greeks, we have the Warriors—yes, the Warriors—led by the sneering Tyler, who is so evil he calls a timeout to end the final game, and his over-the-top coach, who is begging for a mustache to twirl. Instead of Judah, there is an ex-ballplayer with bad knees who lives in a van down by the river. (License plate: JM 165.) Instead of the hills of Judea, there is a facsimile Philadelphia. And the climax of the movie models both miracles of Chanukah when a bunch of Jewish kids succeed where they are not supposed to by outlasting their rivals and a backup generator overextending its fuel supply.

Of course, this idea makes up the DNA of most Jewish sports movies: when the world isn’t a level playing field, let the playing field level the world.  Even Ernest Hemingway noted it, in his more-than-vaguely anti-Semitic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton… He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

Consider School Ties, where the protagonist is a Jewish quarterback in an anti-Semitic 50s boarding school, who bests his detractors in the end zone. Consider Chariots of Fire, where the protagonist is a Jewish runner in an anti-Semitic 20s university, who bests his detractors on the track. Consider Race, where in the midst of Jesse Owens’ story, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller cheesily flash their Star of David necklaces in the faces of Nazi guards. Each feels freakish and undermined, and so responds with feats of greatness, avenging themselves and their people in an arena where disadvantages can be surmounted.

To reflect inward a moment, Full-Court Miracle feels like a movie that was designed almost specifically for me: Jews, sports, loving shots of the Philly skyline, Allen Iverson jerseys. But I can sympathize with Schlotz and his Lions even more because my alma mater once cooked up an experiment as to whether or not a Jewish day school could front a competitive tackle football team. There were even pep rallies and cheerleaders. (My school sport was geography, and no, we did not have pep rallies or cheerleaders.) It went about as well as could be expected, but we kept the orthopedic surgeons sharp that season.

The lesson here is not in the failure, but in what makes Full-Court Miracle such a universal movie: it is ultimately about dreams. Dreams we have and dreams we shouldn’t have, dreams we reach for even though we’re told we can’t accomplish them and dreams that change as we change. Maybe a yeshiva boy shouldn’t dream of playing in the NBA, but neither was Judah Maccabee expected to liberate his people. Which is why this is the Chanukah classic we all deserve—because in the face of insurmountable odds, what is really to fail is to never try at all. (And because of the Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. Of course.)

Image via YouTube

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At what point do we appreciate these seasonal crumbs, and at what point do we turn it into an opportunity to kvetch? Is it nice to be included at all, or do the generic blue decorations smack of insincerity? Isn’t there anyone who knows what Chanukah is all about?

If it’s not worth engaging in debates about the commercialization of Chanukah (the very fact that we give gifts for it mean that ship sailed long ago), we can still nitpick about one thing: Merchandizing accuracy.

A Christmas tree doesn’t need to look like anything; there’s no real right or wrong with the way to depict it on your gay apparel. Chanukah, on the other hand, is full of technicalities, some of which are confusing to even regular practitioners (wait, do I light the Menorah starting from my right or the window’s right?). And so, if we take a closer look at seasonal Jewish products, you can start to notice some pretty mistakes, big and small.

For example, Target came out with a Chanukah-print dress and jumper this year— but if you look closely, you’ll notice that the letters on the dreidl seem to be going left to right; the hey and the gimel spots are reversed. Or more egregiously, a Bonton sweater (currently, somehow, out of stock) depicts a Chanukah menorah as having seven branches, when it has nine… Perhaps they’re simply making a sophisticated reference to the original menorah from the origins of the holiday. (It’s a particular fad— JCrew socks did the same thing— though they generically call them “holiday candle socks.”)

And so, it seems pretty obvious that these retailers create these pieces without talking to an actual Jew, right? Actually, not necessarily.

If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’ve heard an ad for MeUndies— their underwear is hella soft, they have a subscription service for a monthly pair, they make fun prints, etc. And this year, in time for the holiday season, they have released a limited edition print (available for multiple genders, in several different styles): “Joy Vey.”

OK, let’s play a fun game and figure out the two major mistakes on this pair of Jewish underwear:

You find them? The first is that yes, once again, the chanukiyah has only seven branches. The other is the dreidl. It’s not that it’s upside-down— it’s the fact that it has a Bet on it. Now, some dreidls have a Pey where others have a Shin depending where in the world you are, but no dreidls ever have the Hebrew letter Bet.

MeUndies kindly responded to Jewcy for comment, and admitted— they have latke on their face.

“This pair was designed by our creative director, Tyler King, who is indeed Jewish,” said a company rep. “But it doesn’t stop there. Our founder, VP of marketing, head of brand marketing, and CEO are all Jewish and were so excited to release this pair. We felt that Hanukkah has always been underrepresented during the holidays in the U.S., and we hoped this would be a nod to what we always wished for growing up.”

So… what went wrong?

“In our feverish excitement around releasing a print with a Hanukkah theme, we overlooked some key flaws to the design… Tyler, our designer, has told us his family will remind him for the rest of his life about the time he goofed on this Hanukkah print. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive brand, but human error will creep in every so often. These underwear will now live on as a collector’s item and a representation of the time we messed up something that was so close to our hearts.”

And so, what’s the lesson here? An argument for stronger Jewish education to prevent such mistakes? That Jewish-themed apparel needs a mashgiach? That we should all just stop complaining and chill out? (No, definitely not that last one.)

Certainly, it reminds us that it’s not just misguided Gentiles creating off-kilter Chanukah goods. And if Jews can’t muddle our own traditions, who can?

The post Chanukah Fails: Merch Gone Wrong appeared first on Jewcy.

It may be hard to think of a time post-Chanukah, but it’s sooner than you think. And in that week between Christmas and New Years, when you’ve run out of excuses to get out of the house, we present you with one more: Jewcy’s end-of-year, Notakkah party!

We will be celebrating by watching the greatest Chanukah film of all time— The Hebrew Hammer. Conspiracies! Romance! Evil Santa! How does the 2003 film hold up? Well, we may be getting a sequel soon, so now’s the time to re-watch and decide for yourself!

Plus, for an amazing treat after the movie, the film’s creator Jonathan Kesselman will be virtually visiting us for a short video interview!

The shindig is Thursday, December 28th at Halyards Bar (406 3rd Avenue) in Brooklyn.

RSVP on Facebook here!

Doors open at 7 p.m., and we’ll start the movie promptly at 7:30. That will wrap up around 9, and we’ll then have about an hour or so of music, food, surprises, and more.

Admission is free, with a 2-drink minimum.

Including: Did you receive a Chanukah (or other holiday) present that you don’t want? Sweater the wrong size with no gift receipt? A book you already own? Something you just hate? No judgment! Just bring it to the party, and we’ll pool the reject gifts and redistribute them— socialism style! From each according to her Chanukah ability, to each according to her Chanukah need! Heck, bring your leftover chocolate gelt; someone will want it!

Let’s have a party; we’ll all dance the hora.

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Who’s up for some Jewish-queer intersectionality? And how about if that intersection is the form of a Chanukah treat? That’s right, you can make latkes all colors of the rainbow, without getting too far away from traditional potato pancakes, and no, there’s no food coloring involved.

These are really easy, really pretty, and really flavorful. The base recipe (regardless of color) is:

Ingredients:

• (1) egg
• (1/4) onion
• (1) grated vegetable

Instructions:

Mix all in a bowl and form into patties before frying ’em up nice and crispy.

There’s no one way to get the color palette you want, but here are some tips on how to get started:

• Red: Beets
• Orange: Carrots, Sweet Potatoes, orange cauliflower
• Yellow: Potatoes, parsnip, jicima, sunchoke
• Green: Zucchini, broccoli, or if you really want to use kale, go ahead, but mix it with potato for structure
• Blue: If you’re a rainbow completist, my best suggestion is blue potatoes
• Purple: Purple carrot, purple cauliflower

And then tada! A stack of rainbowy, pridey potato pancakes! Allies are also welcome to enjoy!

Now, while they all taste delicious, some flavors mesh together better than others. I tasted the rainbow, if you will, the first time I made these and the beets and carrots didn’t really taste so great together. But taste is subjective, so maybe you like the combination. Feel free to experiment. Don’t be limited by certain latkes identities; it’s the 21st century.

Anyway, go forth and enjoy! And feel free to share your results with us on Twitter!

Image by Rachel Jacobs

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