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Spent yesterday doing the traditional Christmas festivities: chinese food and a movie, natch! The movie was a particularly appropriate one, The Hebrew Hammer (tagline: “He’s the baaaadest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv”). It’s been billed as a sort of Shaft for Jews, which is appropriate not just in its appropriation of its riffs on Shaft as a movie, but also because the film is in some ways filling the same sort of function: both movies reject assimilation, embracing and foregrounding aspects of a minority subculture. In the case of The Hebrew Hammer, this shows up not just in the ironic fetishism of the Star of David, but in the character of the Hammer himself, who is in fact a badass, if a badass who’s surrounded by strong women and who overintellectualizes everything.

On a tangentially related note, Doug Rushkoff has a great post up about the relationship between Hanukkah and Christmas:

For some Jews, Christmas is where we draw the line of our assimilation. In other words, we might go see Handel’s Messiah, but we won’t decorate a tree, or have one in the living room. (Even though the tree is actually a very pre-Christian pagan German thing, I know.)

That’s why it’s kind of funny that Hannukah is celebrated at this time, too. Not because of the whole ‘oil lamps defy the darkness of solstice’ thing, which I’m sure has its pagan roots, too. No, it’s because Hannukah celebrates a war against assimilation – a moment where religious, country Jews stormed the city and clobbered the Jews who had given up their identity and assimilated into Greek culture, and then forced them all to have circumcisions.

It is often said that without the Hannukah wars, Judaism would have perished.

So it’s kind of fun that this holiday about fighting the pull of assimilation – about drawing the line, and feeling the difference – happens right when America is at its most Christian feeling for many of us.

Read the whole thing, and regardless of whether you were around Christmas lights, Hanukkah lights, Kwanzaa lights, or plain old secular lights, I hope you had a good holiday.

Now, on to New Years Eve…

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