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From the minute Halloween ends until New Year’s Eve, you’ll see some businesses display menorahs next to Christmas trees, and holiday concerts feature the dreidel song alongside “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas!” some people lament. The Jewish Festival of Lights, which begins Thursday night, certainly hasn’t always been as commercialized as it is today. Big gifts, public menorah lighting ceremonies, Hanukkah merch – none of that is exactly “traditional.” Religiously, in fact, it’s a pretty minor holiday.
But Hanukkah’s changes aren’t just about assimilation. Samira Mehta, a gender and Jewish studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains how Hanukkah celebrations have evolved over the years – as Christmas festivities have, too. Blending old and new traditions allowed American Jews to write a new chapter in their story – “engaging their Judaism in a new place and time.”
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Candles on a large Hanukkah menorah shine in front of a Christmas tree at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, in 2015.
Gregor Fischer/picture alliance via Getty Images
Samira Mehta, University of Colorado Boulder
Assimilation no doubt played a role in making Hanukkah the commercialized holiday it is today. But other factors shaped the modern festival, too, a scholar of Jewish studies and gender explains.
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Environment + Energy
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Curtis VanderSchaaf, Mississippi State University
How many years you reuse a fake holiday tree matters. So does what happens to a live tree when you’ve packed up the ornaments.
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David Samuel Johnson, Virginia Institute of Marine Science
South of Cape Cod, fiddler crabs and marsh grass have long had a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s a different story in the North, where the harms can ricochet through ecosystems.
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Jennie L. Durant, University of California, Davis
Inert ingredients are added for purposes other than killing pests and are not required under federal law to be tested for safety or identified on pesticide labels.
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Politics + Society
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Jeannine Bell, Loyola University Chicago
There has been a sharp uptick in crimes specifically targeting Muslim and Jewish people since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October 2023.
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Thomas Coens, University of Tennessee
Is American democracy an ‘experiment’ in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?
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Science + Technology
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Andrea Boggio, Bryant University
Decades ago, the international community codified science as a cultural right and protected expression of human creativity. Reaffirming science’s value can help it better serve humanity.
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Mary Magnuson, The Conversation
Claims about the discovery of a coveted room-temperature superconductor peppered the news in 2023. We pulled three stories from our archives on what superconductivity is and why scientists study it.
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Ethics + Religion
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Michael Naparstek, University of Tennessee
Through the power of rituals, inanimate objects can be understood to transform into agents who can see, hear, taste and respond to the concerns of those who worship them.
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