By Debbie Schlussel

Tonight, at sundown, the first day of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah begins. (Yes, it’s also spelled Channukah, Chanukkah, Hanukah, Hannukah, Hanukkah, and in several other ways as a result of Hebrew-to-English transliteration which isn’t an exact science, something I’ve covered on this site.)

Jewish U.S. Combat Unit Soldiers in World War II Celebrate Chanukah in the South Pacific Battlefield (Photos by U.S. Army Private Mack Gould) . . .

As you may have heard, it is also the first time since 1888 and the last time until the year 79811 that Thanksgiving and the first day of Chanukah coincide. That’s led to an, at first, cute and, now, totally annoying marketing gimmick in which several companies and some (mostly secular) Jews are pimping products bearing the name “Thanksgivukkah.” To me, it’s a stupid thing, especially since most of the people touting this are Jews who are far left, very secular, and know very little about Judaism, nor will this increase that. One kid invented a “menurkey,” a menorah (the Jewish candelabra we light on Chanukah) that is shaped like a turkey and isn’t even a kosher menorah, so it would not fulfill the Jewish requirement of lighting the menorah candles on Chanukah.

I’ve been asked by various readers and friends how I will celebrate “Thanksgivukkah,” and my response is that I don’t celebrate that fictional holiday. I celebrate both the Jewish holiday of Chanukah and the American holiday of Thanksgiving. But they are separate holidays marking separate and different things. One, Chanukah, is a religious, spiritual holiday, celebrating many miracles, including the incredible Jewish military victory of the Maccabees against the Assyrian-Greeks, who vastly outnumbered them, and the fact that a jar of oil to light the menorah candles in the Jewish Temple lasted eight days when there was only enough oil for one day. The other, Thankgiving, is a national holiday in thanks for the existence of our great country, its freedoms, and the many blessings bestowed upon us as Americans. If anything, the Pilgrims modeled Thanksgiving harvest celebrations on the Jewish Sukkot (or Tabernacles) celebrations.

And what galls me is that most of the Jews pimping me on this Thanksgivukkah baloney are liberal Jews and Obama voters and who have said and done nothing in protest of Obama’s absurd deal with the modern day equivalent of the Assyrian-Greeks: Iran. We live in a time of darkness, and they don’t get it. We have the greatest technological advances, cheap and easy clothes and accoutrements, plentiful food, and conveniences galore. But those are all window dressing when most of the world’s powers have made a deal with the devil, a one-sided deal in which we get nothing and the Iranians get everything. And there are no Maccabees to do anything about it. These Thanksgivukkah Jews are the modern-day Hellenist Jews, whom the Maccabees would slaughter in great numbers as they did the Hellenists. What most Jews don’t realize is that the Maccabees, while they killed the Greek soldiers and defeated King Antiochus Epiphanies, fought for years–more than two decades!–to reclaim Judaism and Israel and Jerusalem and the Temple, and most of those whom they had to fight and kill were Jews. These were the Jews who’d turned against Judaism and embraced the Greek materialistic lifestyle and idol worship. The Maccabees slaughtered tens (and maybe hundreds) of thousands more Jews than Greek soldiers. And they would have slaughtered these Thanksgivukkah Jews for the most part. These are the Jews In Name Only (JINOs) who like Jewish culture and foods, but they have no spiritual connection to me or the Torah. They need gimmick Judaism, just as they fell for a gimmick President. Style over substance on steroids. And that is the very definition of the Hellenism that was the antagonist and evil in the Chanukah story.

I guarantee you the father of that kid who trademarked and invented the non-kosher Thanksgivukkah menorah, the “Menurkey” (and the father paid for all those expenses), voted for Obama. And I guarantee you that he and his family would have been beheaded by the Maccabees. All of these Jewish groups–including to my great distress, the Orthodox Union, which is supposed to be the lead organization representing Orthodox Jews–have resigned themselves to this horrible agreement with Iran and refuse to oppose it, vehemently or otherwise. Yup, no Maccabees they. In fact, they are the modern-day equivalent of the anti-Maccabees. Wimps. Wusses.

We’ve made an agreement with Iran which forces them to do nothing. They are allowed to continue funding Hezbollah, which murdered hundreds of American Marines and U.S. Embassy workers and officials as well as Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem, and to continue to refuse to apologize to America for these murders or for holding our Americans hostage for 444 days in Tehran in 1979-1981. They are allowed to continue torturing and murdering political prisoners and Jews and Christians whose “crime” is practicing faith. The Iranians are allowed to continue executing gays and to financing Shi’ite terrorist fighters in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere and to fund Shi’ite rebellions from Dearborn, Michigan to Saudi Arabia’s Qatif Peninsula to Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf. Iran gets to continue its proud funding of HAMAS. And Iran continues building its Hezbollah satellites throughout Central and South America and throughout Africa. And Iran has said it will continue to enrich uranium and build plants which can only be used to complete its nuclear weapons aim.

In exchange for this nothing that we “get,” Iran gets a whole lot. The country is welcomed back into the international community with open arms and they get all kinds of economic incentives. Iran gets gazillions in U.S. goods and, yes, AID! The embargo that barely was is now completely non-existent. And any Iranian suffering because of it, is now over. Plus, Iran gets to sell its oil on the open market, unfettered. Cha-ching! Funds that America froze are now returned to Iran. Yet, in some cases, these funds were frozen in order to pay American hostages, victims of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking and murders, and American and other victims of Hezbollah and HAMAS terrorism it funded. These victims and their families are now the losers and victimized all over again. Thanks, Obama Epiphanies, King of American political Hellenism.

Maccabeean times minus the Maccabees we desperately need. Yesterday’s Hellenism is today’s Miley Cyrus/Kardashianism plus Obama Epiphanies as the King. As I said, we live in dark times, and American Jews are too “comfortable” to see it, just as secular German Jews were too comfortable to see things back in Hitler’s emergent day. And today we are embracing the Hitlers of Iran with kudos to ourselves, pats on the back for a treaty–an agreement–worthy of the emperor’s new clothes. And the treaty is as substantive as the non-existent garments.

Every year, I try to post pictures of American soldiers during World War II celebrating Chanukah. Those soldiers fought the forces of darkness and evil, and they triumphed because America did not deal with the enemy and willingly get tricked. Nope. We smote the enemy. Those soldiers, today, would be disgusted, but most of their grandchildren are deluded in the comfort that they voted for Obama. Those soldiers risked everything to fight and beat the enemy. Today, we embrace that enemy at all cost and eat something on the Farsi menu and smile.

So, as I light the first candle on my menorah tonight, marking the start of the first night and day of Chanukah, I will celebrate the Maccabees’ victory over Greeks and the Hellenists . . . and especially the Hellenist Jews. But I will lament that the victory, all these centuries later, sadly, didn’t last.

And we need a whole lot more miracles. I hope G-d is listening.

Happy Chanukah to all my Jewish friends and readers!

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More on Chanukah:

As Jewish holidays go, Chanukah is a minor one. It is not on the level of Christmas, though it’s been artificially been elevated to that status by lazy parents (generally the Hellenist Obama voter types) and eager marketers and retailers. Back in Europe and Israel, parents never gave their kids gifts for the holiday, just “gelt” (gold–usually gold coins).

While it lasts eight days, we work and go about our business on those eight days except while the menorah candles are burning. We light candles on the menorah (Jewish candelabra) in progressive numbers on each night–one for the first night, two for the second night, and so on. We also light another candle each night which is known at the shamash. It is the candle used to light the other menorah candles, and it is required to be higher than the other candles, which are required to be all of the same height. The candles are required to burn at least a half hour.

On Chanukah, it’s also custom to play a game with a spinning top, called a dreidel. The dreidel has four different Hebrew letters on each side, which are the initials for a Hebrew phrase, Nes Gadol Hayah Sham, which means, “A Great Miracle Happened There [Here, if you’re in Israel].” And as I noted above, we eat the latke potato pancakes. In Israel, they eat sufganiyot–jelly-filled donuts.

Chanukah is the story of the few against the many–-the few Maccabees, led by Matthew [Matityahu, and then, after his death, Matthew’s son, Judah [Yehudah], who fought against oppression by Greek-Assyrian (Seleucid) King Antiochus Epiphanies and miraculously beat him and his army, which far outnumbered the Jews. As I mentioned, it’s the story of the one jar of olive oil which miraculously lasted eight days–the amount of time it took to make more jars–in lighting the menorah [candelabra] in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. All other jars had been destroyed or made impure by the Greeks, and it was the one jar that miraculously survived intact. Above all, Chanukah is about the age-old, repeat fight of the Jewish people for religious freedom.

Again, it must be remembered that the most of the bloody fights and slaughter the Maccabees had to carry out were not those of their Greek-Assyrian enemies, but those of their fellow Jews, whose behavior could have meant the end of Judaism. While I don’t advocate that today–or violence of any kind, the Maccabees showed no mercy toward these ignoramuses who embraced the enemy, toward these eager sell-outs. And anyone and everyone who celebrates Chanukah must celebrate that as well or they simply aren’t observing the holiday and what it’s all about.

The Maccabees were warriors. They were strong, and they had no fear. They’d easily take out any of those who, today, mock Jews as weak. We weren’t weak then. Only the Hellenists were, and their modern-day imitators are the weak ones in our community.

Chanukah was about how peace and survival of the Jewish people was achieved through battle–through a war fought by a group of brave, valiant Jewish men who fought not only against the enemy without, but the enemy within.

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Check out “My Big Fat Cool Menorah Collection“!

Check out my documented moving stories of how Jewish U.S. Soldiers celebrated Chanukah while they were fighting in World War II in Europe and the South Pacific.

Again, to all of my Jewish readers and friends, I wish you a spiritual and meaningful Chanukah. I hope the holiday has the same meaning for you that it does for me–of victory over those who would destroy us.

Chanukah Dreidel