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Jewish national liberation holiday.  Chanukah (evening of November 28 – December 6, 2021) is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike the national liberation holidays, Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles and Shavu’ot/Pentecost, which commemorate the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to liberation in the land of Israel, and unlike Purim, which commemorates liberation from a Persian attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.   

Historical context  Chanukah is narrated in the four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus and The Wars of the Jews.

In 323 BCE, the Greek Empire was split into three independent and rival mini-empires (Greece-Seleucid/Syria-Ptolemaic/Egypt), following the death of Alexander the Great (Alexander III) who held Judaism in high esteem.

In 175 BCE, the Seleucid/Syrian Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanes claimed the Land of Israel, and suspected that the Jews were allies of his Ptolemaic/Egyptian enemy.  The Seleucid emperor was known for eccentric behavior, hence his name, Epiphanes, which means “divine manifestation.”  He aimed to exterminate Judaism and convert Jews to Hellenism. In 169 BCE, he devastated Jerusalem, attempted to massacre the Jewish population, and outlawed the practice of Judaism.

In 166/7 BCE, a Jewish rebellion was led by members of the non-establishment Hasmonean (Maccabee) family – from the rural town of Modi’in, half way between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean – headed by Mattityahu, the priest, and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan and Eleazar. They fought the Seleucid occupier and established Jewish independence.  The Hasmonean dynasty was replete with external and internal wars and lasted until 37 BCE, when Herod the Great (a proxy of Rome) defeated Antigonus II Mattathias.    

The success of the Maccabees on the battlefield was consistent with the reputation of Jews as superb warriors, who were frequently hired as mercenaries by Egypt, Syria, Carthage, Rome and other global and regional powers.

When ordered by Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid region to end the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Akron, Shimon the Maccabee responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land…. We have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation (Book of Maccabees A: 15:33).”

Chanukah and the Land of Israel.  Chanukah highlights the centrality of the Land of Israel in the formation of Jewish history, religion and culture. The mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria (the West Bank) were the platform for the Maccabean military battles: Mitzpah (the burial site of the Prophet Samuel, overlooking Jerusalem), Beth El (the site of the Ark of the Covenant and Judah the Maccabee’s initial headquarters), Beth Horon (Judah’s victory over Seron), Hadashah (Judah’s victory over Nicanor), Beth Zur (Judah’s victory over Lysias), Ma’aleh Levona (Judah’s victory over Apolonius), Adora’yim (a Maccabean fortress), Eleazar (named after Mattityahu’s youngest Maccabee son), Beit Zachariya (Judah’s first defeat), Ba’al Hatzor (where Judah was defeated and killed), Te’qoah, Mikhmash and Gophnah (bases of Shimon and Yonatan), the Judean Desert, etc.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hanukkah-celebrates-victory-in-struggle-to-maintain-judaism-opinion-686901

At the end of the Second Temple period, Jews struggled against the influence of Hellenism and the cultures and armies of Greece and Rome. They struggled to maintain Judaism and Jewish values and to preserve their independence as a nation-state in Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel. Their struggle was not only against external enemies but also internal divisions in a society divided among religious and political factions. They had a Temple, the focus of religious inspiration – at least for many – wise rabbinic authorities, a thriving economy and a powerful army. What happened?

As noted in the ArtScroll book, Chanukah: Its History, Observance, And Significance, “the famous ‘miracle of the lights,’ when a one-day supply of pure olive oil burned for eight days, took place three years after the beginning of the Hasmonean revolt. That is the only miracle that the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) mentions in its brief description of the Hanukkah events. The Al HaNissim liturgy, however, which recounts the festival’s origin and which is inserted into the Hanukkah prayers, tells a different story. There, the eight-day miracle of the oil is not even mentioned. There, the emphasis is on the miracles of the military triumph.”

Rabbi Dr. Shubert Spero, in his book Holocaust and Return to Zion, writes that Hanukkah is “about the condition of basic unity and fraternity of Jewish society during the first century CE. The rabbis were referring to the disintegration of the Jewish people in Judea into a cluster of warring and bickering sects, of which Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and New Christians were only the major ones.

“These religious and political divisions were the background for the unjustified hatred that destroyed the national unity of the Jewish people. There no longer was a common purpose or a felt mutual responsibility to support a national Jewish polity. This was the underlying cause of the disaster.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17951/slavery

The “1619 Project” literature is characteristic of today’s neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.

The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa.

The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history components and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. “Slavery”, as Paul Louis reminds us, “is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations”.

Slavery is not a moral choice, it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves.

Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world.

In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.

In August 2019, The New York Times initiated The 1619 Project, consisting of a collection of articles designed to illustrate that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution”. This project is directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff reporter who is not a historian but an avowed “critical race theory” activist. [2]

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316525

Between the late evening hours of November 9, and the early morning of the 10th, the German rioters destroyed and firebombed 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, leaving many of them burning during the night in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. Explosives were used in some locations to wreck the buildings. [1]

The shop windows of an estimated 7,500 commercial establishments out of approximately 9,000 Jewish-owned stores were smashed and their merchandise looted or scattered on the sidewalk and streets.[2] It as estimated the amount of plate glass shattered equaled half the yearly production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which the glass had been imported.[3]

Schoolboys were in the vanguard of many attacks against the Jews, and in breaking windows. Teachers provided them with clubs for them to demolish Jewish businesses.[4]

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, initiated the nation-wide pogrom without any well-defined objective or any strategy as to the methods that would be employed. This led to a “hasty and improvised organization” causing “messiness and miscommunication.” Aside from being disorganized, impulsive and chaotic, “the lack of control” is what terrified the victims. [5]

The magnitude of murder, rape and sexual attacks (the extent to which will never be known), the systematic public humiliations, indiscriminate looting of private homes, loss of property and the level of terror that ensued, shocked the nation and unnerved the regime.

https://quillette.com/2021/11/05/face-to-face-with-the-auschwitz-memorial-twitter-project/

The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.

~Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

A girl of perhaps 11 years, with lush, braided hair and a beautiful face, sits alone in a classroom looking up from her book at the photographer. She is self-possessed and gives the most natural smile.

Another photo shows a girl of five or six intently studying something she holds in her hands, possibly a flower or a piece of white cloth. She has a white bow in her hair.

In a third photo, a handsome, well-dressed woman in her late teens is sitting in an armchair by an open window smiling, apparently engaged in conversation.

These are three of a succession of arresting photographs accompanying brief online biographies of people transported to Auschwitz and, with rare exceptions, killed there between 1941 and 1945.

The photographs are posted on the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter site, which is run by the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-evade-pre-prohibition-drinking-laws-new-yor

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”

In his crackdown on vice in New York, Theodore Roosevelt supported the Raines Law.

New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.

The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/armenian-genocide-past-present-and-future-raymond-ibrahim/

On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.  What was this genocide about, and what is its significance for today?

The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I, specifically between 1915 and 1917:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

The evidence is indeed overwhelming.  As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  (Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.)

In short, that the Turks orchestrated and carried out a deliberate genocide of Armenians during World War I is an uncontested fact—for those who still care about facts—irrespective of who does or does not acknowledge it (Turkey itself epitomizing the latter category).

Even so, the extent of Turkish atrocities committed against Armenians far exceeds the Armenian Genocide.  In fact, it is more appropriate to see the latter, not as a singular event, but as an especially severe segment of an ancient and ongoing continuum.

The Genocide before the Genocide

The Turks’ initial genocide of Armenians began slightly over a thousand years ago, when the Muslim tribesmen first began to pour into and transform a then much-larger Armenia into what it is today: the eastern portion of modern-day Turkey.

Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief chronicler for this period.  Three decades later, the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”

After thoroughly plundering the city, he ordered it, including 800 churches, to be set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.”  Eight hundred oxen and forty camels were required to cart out the vast plunder, mostly taken from Arzden’s churches. “How to relate here, with a voice stifled by tears,” continues Matthew, the many butchered Armenians who were “left without graves” and “became the prey of carrion beasts,” and “the exodus of women … led with their children into slavery and condemned to an eternal servitude! That was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” laments the chronicler, “so, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.”