It's more important than ever to bust myths about Hanukkah

As promised, I am pulling this from last week's Texas Progressives roundup, with today being the last day of Hanukkah.

Kuffner found this piece, and it's all wrong.

Rabbi Levi Greenberg writes about Hanukkah's message that evil can be defeated. 

It's got a picture of Chabad at the top of the column, plus Greenberg being a Lubavitcher. It's Zionist just from the Chabad angle, and it's also messianic (and not in that "Messianic Christian" sense) with the Lubavitch angle, especially if Greenberg holds to the Schneerson as Messiah cult within the Lubavitcher world.

Also, since Hanukkah was adapted from an already existing Persian winter solstice festival, it's a lie; more thoughts on that and related here. (A bit more here; more myth and legend in general deconstructed here.) And, reading between the lines about the celebration of the fall of the House of Assad in Syria, and the silence on something else, it's anti-Palestinian. Shock me that Kuff, who passes by the plight of Palestine and pro-Palestinian protestors in silent contempt, would like something like this

Finally, some Hanukkah alt-history, riffing on the first "here" link, here.