Happy Chanukah

This (taken in Kiel, Germany in 1931 and then colorized) is one of the most famous photographs in Jewish history, but it acquired special resonance this weekend. It communicates pretty much everything I’d want to say about the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia, more succinctly than I could in words.

But I can’t resist sharing one more photo, after GPT5-Pro helpfully blurred the faces for me. This is my 8-year-old son Daniel, singing a Chanukah song at our synagogue, at an event the morning after the massacre, which was packed despite the extra security needed to get in.

Alright, one more photo. This is Ahmed Al Ahmed, the hero who tackled and disarmed one of the terrorists when the police wouldn’t intervene, recovering in the hospital from his gunshot wounds. Facebook and Twitter and (alas) sometimes the comment section of this blog show me the worst of humanity, day after day after day, so it’s important to remember the best of humanity as well.

Chanukah, of course, is the most explicitly Zionist of all Jewish holidays, commemorating as it does the Maccabees’ military victory against the Seleucid Greeks, in their (historically well-attested) wars of 168-134BCE to restore an independent Jewish state with its capital in Jerusalem. In a sense, then, the terrorists were precisely correct, when they understood the cry “globalize the intifada” to mean “murder random Jews anywhere on earth, even halfway around the world, who might be celebrating Chanukah.” By the lights of the intifada worldview, Chabadniks in Sydney were indeed perfectly legitimate targets. By my worldview, though, the response is equally clear: to abandon all pretense, and say openly that now, as in countless generations past, Jews everywhere are caught up in a war, not of our choosing, which we “win” merely by surviving with culture and memory intact.

Happy Chanukah.