Thoughts on the Festival of Lights, or: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned to Love the Baum

I hate to interrupt this steady stream of everyone posting for something so self-indulgent, but I'd like to doff a cap for Hanukkah, if I may. The holiday, which started last night, is essentially known in three different ways: Most Christians know it as the Jewish Christmas, a few Christians and most Jews are aware of it as when some oil lasted eight days after a battle of some kind, and Jews who graduated from Hebrew High School in Palo Alto, Calif. can describe it as something more. (First link that came up for "true story of Hanukkah" + "assimilation" and I'm lazy.) Anyway! The Festival of Lights has one more special significance that I don't think gets enough play. This is what I'm talking about:


Shocked? Don't be. Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song" -- while unbelievably, unbelievably cliched at this point -- is, I would argue, a true keystone for American Jewry. Sandler first sang it on Saturday Night Live in 1995 and I believe that day turned the tide on more than just his career. Despite the tune's seeming novelty status and limited appeal, it actually did crazy well on the Billboard charts, even becoming a Top 20 "mainstream rock track" (whatever that is) when he released it on CD a few years later. (I mean, I still can't believe how into it that crowd seems for the friggin' Hannukah Song.)


The first ever public version of the song, on Weekend Update.

Before 1995, well, I was eleven. But in any analysis of Jews in pop culture to that point would suggest that being Jewish, frankly, wasn't very cool. It's not so much that Jews felt they had to hide they were Jewish, even recently (looking at you Winona Horowitz, I mean Ryder) it's that the public perception was that every one was Woody Allen (f.k.a. Allen Konigsberg): a nebbishy inept schlump in therapy. But that isn't exactly the case anymore. While some Jews still play the classic effeminate whiner (see: Braff, Zach) more and more often being Jewish is almost something oddly hip. Look at this Gap ad with Jeremy Piven, who has also done ads for JDate. Or so I'm told.


Somewhat unbelievably, he's wearing a Jewish star necklace in full view! That ran in, like, national magazines! This is the new Jew? Muscular and suave? Fair enough! The bottom line is that at some point, mainstream American culture decided it was kinda cool to be a little Jewish. Some will argue it was Jerry Seinfeld, whose show was famously turned down initially because it was "too Jewish." But as it became the most popular comedy of the 1990s, "Jewish humor" became more accepted until the point where countless awful sitcom writers today try to force gentiles to tell jokes like a Heeb.

But I point to Sandler, who gave young Jews their first piece of pop culture that was ours, the first cool thing that maybe our non-Jewish friends actually wanted to be a part of. Sandler pulled off one of the great social transitions of our lifetime in three minutes: he took the isolationism of being a young Jew at the end of the millenium in America and turned it into a cool kids club, full of gin-and-tonicahs and -- wink, wink -- absolutely no marijuanaka. It was around this time you started to hear people talking about others as "belonging to the tribe." And, boom, just like that, you were proud to have a Bar Mitzvah, to be going to Hebrew School (and even, oy vey, Hebrew High School, when all the actually cool kids were still smoking pot behind the In-N-Out Burger). See, so what if we were different? Listen to the radio!-- That song is about us!

So do you guys think I'm cool yet? Guys?