(Jewish Group) "Untraditional" Hanukkah celebrations are often full of traditions for Jews of color
Hanukkah, the Jewish "festival of lights," commemorates a story of a miracle, when oil meant to last for one day lasted for eight. Today, Jews light the menorah, a candelabra with eight candles — and one "helper" candle, called a shamas — to remember the Hanukkah oil, which kept the Jerusalem temple's everlasting lamp burning brightly. Each year, the holiday starts with just the shamas and one of the eight candles and ends, on the last night, with the entire menorah lit up.
But because the reason for the light is oil, Jews also celebrate by eating food cooked in oil. In the United States, most people think of those oil-soaked foods as latkes, or potato pancakes, and jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot. For most American Jews, these are indeed important holiday foods, replete with memories — both of their heavy, greasy deliciousness and of the smells that permeate the house for days after a latke fry.
More specifically, though, these treats are Ashkenazi, referring to Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of Jews in the U.S. identify as Ashkenazi, which has strongly shaped American Jewish culture. That Eastern European culture, however, is only one of many Jewish cultures around the world.
In recent years, Jews of color and non-Ashkenazi Jews have been bringing attention to new Hanukkah traditions that celebrate the diversity of Judaism in the U.S. My work as a scholar of gender and Jewish studies often looks at how multicultural families navigate and celebrate the many aspects of their identities.
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