The Miami Heat hosted a Jewish heritage night at the basketball team's Dec. 12 game at American Airlines Arena, with tens of thousands in attendance. How odd, I thought, to celebrate Hanukkah in a sports arena, given that the concept of sports is emblematic of Greek culture.
This Hanukkah, when Jews light their menorahs, we should remember that the item we are lighting holds a large cultural and historical significance. It symbolizes not only the miracle of the lasting oil, but also the miracle of the surviving Jewish people.
We are living in times of darkness, where change seems impossible. But there are small groups of people who are working to make a difference.
As the attendant to the light, the Shamash is responsible for lighting all the others. So too, each of us is a light. We have the choice as to whether we live from that lit-up place or ignore our light.
When our friends at BuzzFeed published this collection of awesome and unexpected menorahs for Hanukkah, we kvelled (reacted with joy for the non-Yiddi...
Taking a symbol like the menorah, which represents that struggle of adhering to faith in the face of an oppressive Greek culture that believed everything should be secular and rational, and redefining it as having secular connotations contradicts what the menorah represents.
We will be celebrating Hanukkah once again this year, lighting candles, eating latkes, opening presents and spinning dreidels. We'll sing Hanukkah songs. We'll talk about the holiday a lot, but I'm not going to tell my girls the story of Judah the Maccabee. Not yet.
Nature has parked itself on small sections of our city's corner. Soon, the trees will be gone, my son observes, sold to homes where they will decorate living rooms and be adorned with bows, ornaments, trinkets and gifts. His living room will be empty of such wonder.
Every year I spend one night of Hanukkah with my grandmother, who is 89 years old. And every year it seems that I manage to leave this poor woman in tears.
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, is celebrated Dec. 20-28. Send your photos of menorah lighting, latke frying and dreidel spinning to religion...
WASHINGTON -- A special lighting ceremony is planned for the National Hanukkah Menorah near the White House on the first night of the eight-day Jewish...
For those celebrating Hanukkah, it's literally just days away now (this year the Jewish holiday falls on Tuesday, December 20). There will be blue and...
Even though my menorah is dedicated to the latke, the symbolic fried food that I make for chanukah comes from my Hungarian roots: langos.
A rabbi in Evergreen who has been able to display a menorah in front of a community building for almost six years, is no longer able to since the city...
NEW YORK -- New York City's Jewish Museum has invited author Maurice Sendak to rummage through its collection and choose menorahs for a Hanukkah exhib...
The holidays are not just a time where kids dream about getting gifts. It's also a time when aspiring inventors dream of hitting it big with a holi...
What does it mean to light a Hanukkah candle?
Dec. 1 marked the beginning of Hanukkah, the Jewish "Festival of Lights", which runs through Dec. 9. HuffPost bloggers Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi ...
What is the real miracle of Hanukkah? It is the miracle of human courage that empowers us to take risks for the future even in our imperfect, uncertain world. It is the courage, even in the darkest of times, to create our own light.
We had found it was getting increasingly difficult to get too worked up over Chanukah. We still wanted to do something for Chanukah but we also wanted it to be something that adults would enjoy.
While I'm still not a fan of endless C-major holiday songs and goyishe blinking lights, I have learned to make my peace with Chrismas - ironically, because of the same "paganism" that I once used to decry.
From the story of Chanukah, we see how not to fight a guerrilla insurgency. From the Maccabees, we learn how to rally a people and a nation. Here are Chanukah's five geopolitical lessons.
JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists have uncovered one of the earliest depictions of a menorah, the seven-branched candelabra that has come to sy...
