This sermon was written by Rabbi I.B. Koller, Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation B’nai Israel, Charleston, W.Va., and Rabbi Victor H. Urecki of B’nai Jacob Synagogue in Charleston, W. Va. I’ve been given permission to reprint their sermon. I think it’s fitting for the last night of Chanukah.

There is always a good reason for why Jews have the customs we have as a religion. At the same time, however, there is almost always a real reason for the customs we have as well. And when it comes to the dreidel and the latke, two particular objects of Chanukah we all know so well, the good reasons are not real and the real reasons are not good!

Next to the menorah, the shofar, and the Torah, the dreidel is perhaps the best known Jewish object. Here is what we do know about the dreidel. It is a four sided top with the Hebrew letters nun, gimel, hey, and shin. When you put the letters together, they form an acronym that stands for the phrase: “Nes Gadol Haya Sham” or “A great miracle happened there”. On Chanukah, it is customary to play a little gambling game using this top to celebrate this joyous holiday.

But why do Jews play dreidel? In other words, where does the dreidel come from? When did it start and why? Did Judah Maccabee start the tradition? Was it a custom created by the rabbis of the Talmud? If so, why a top and why gambling?

So here is the good reason for why we play dreidel, the reason we always hear. Dreidel was created a long time ago out of a need to be able to teach and pass on our faith when it had to be passed on in secret. During Roman times, when the study of Torah was outlawed, Jews had to find ways to fool the authorities and teach our faith when it was dangerous to do so. Thus, Jews created dreidel and other types of innocent games that could be played without arousing suspicion from the authorities. Dreidel conveyed the meaning and message of the holiday and allowed the story of Chanukah to be told without fear of discovery. Good reason.

Unfortunately, it is not the real reason. In fact, the dreidel originally had nothing to do with Chanukah and actually had more to do with the Christmas season!

Here is the real reason we play dreydl. In the winter (around Christmas time) in England and Ireland, a popular game called totum or teetotum was created. Totum was a game that started in the 1500’s to pass the time during the long winter season. Totum was a four sided top used for gambling with four letters – T (take all), H (take half), P (put down) and N (get nothing). In Eastern Europe, a similar game grew out of this totum and German letters were added to this pastime: – N (Nicht/ Nothing), G (Ganz/All), H (Halb/ Half), S (Shtel-in/ Put In). In Germany, the game was called “trundle” and when Jews started playing it, they put Hebrew letters on it and called it in Yiddish “varfl” ( to thrown in) or a “dreidel” (to spin).

So dreidel has its origins in England around Christmas time and later in Germany. Jews, therefore, who won’t buy or use German products or use anything associated with Christmas will have to rethink playing dreydl this year!

Oh, and don’t delve too deeply into the history of the latke, either. If you take some measure of pride in that Jewish delicacy, you will likely lose your appetite for it. Here, too, while the good reason is that the latke was created by Jews to celebrate the miracle of the “oil” (since the potato pancake is fried in oil), it actually didn’t start with us. The “latke” was actually a popular winter dish common throughout much of Poland centuries before Jews even got there. We took it and grafted it into our culture as well. Like the dreidel, the latke is not Biblical, Talmudic or even Jewish. It is no more Jewish than a hamburger.

(And don’t even ask me to tell you about Chanukah money or “Gelt”. I’m sorry to say that it, too, originally had nothing to do with Chanukah.)

Now, why am I doing this to our Chanukah traditions? Because I think this teaches us something very important about Judaism and Jewish survival.

Chanukah celebrates the story of the Jewish people rising up against those who would wanted to purge us of our heritage. It is the story of the Syrian-Greeks, in the year 165 B.C.E., defiling our Temple, trampling our religious way of life and demanding that we assimilate and become Hellenists. They wanted us to give up our identity and our religion.

You might think it ironic, therefore, that on this very holiday which celebrates victory over assimilation, that we play the dreidel game and eat latkes which are perfect examples of assimilation. After all, are we not using a game that was popularized by Christians and eating a delicacy from a culture that was not our own?

But my point is that Jews have survived because our people have been adept at making a distinction between assimilation and acculturation. Assimilation is the cultural absorption of a community into the main cultural body. Acculturation is adapting to new and different cultures and surroundings, being influenced but not swallowed up by those cultures. Acculturation is the only way to survive as a minority.

Jews have always had to battle to survive as a people. Christians, with nearly two billion followers, do not worry about their survival, nor do a billion Muslims, but the tiny Jewish minority of just under 14 million worldwide have always been embattled. When we weren’t being persecuted, we had to find ways to keep ourselves distinct and avoid disappearance. When we weren’t fleeing for our lives, we had to answer: how can we survive as a people without assimilating?

And for the last two thousand years, the Jewish religion has been able to survive precisely because Jews have successfully acculturated to society, adapting our heritage and faith to our surroundings. We like to think of Jews surviving because we were stubborn and refused to adapt to the surrounding cultures. Just the opposite! The truth of the matter is we successfully found ways to take aspects of every society we lived in and incorporate them into our own practices.

That is the meaning of dreidel, latke and a whole host of customs and tradition we do to this day. They were never part of the Torah, the Talmud or even the Codes of Jewish Law. They were traditions of the societies we lived in; we adopted them and adapted them into our world to be used to keep our faith and our people alive. We took the totum and made it a dreidel. That is not assimilation; that is acculturation and there is nothing wrong with that. Acculturation is the only way a minority can survive.

Think I am wrong? Look at how Jews took the German language, added Hebrew letters and created Yiddish; we also took Spanish, added Hebrew and created Ladino. Jews in Middle Eastern cultures created a more Eastern form of Jewish expression and Jews in Europe created a more Western influenced faith, from the foods we ate to the language we spoke to the prayers we recited. The religious “core” always stayed the same but the “trappings” changed to conform to the societies they were in.

The very key to our survival is found in the dreidel and the latke. The Jew didn’t assimilate, nor did he drop his heritage, but acculturated to the society he was in and found new ways to practice the faith of his ancestors. When faced with the challenge of survival, the Jew always acculturated as a way of maintaining his identity.

Look at what has happened to Chanukah in America, from the decorations that we have added as a result of Christmas to fancy menorahs that are more closely related to the American experience than anything seen by Judah Maccabee and his warriors. Purists may mortified by what they are seeing but I am not. I think it is the ongoing acculturation of our Jewish community, maintaining our cultural identity in a society that calls us to fully assimilate. Isolation is not an option and assimilation is cultural suicide; acculturation is how a people survives.

Acculturation is what Jews have done for centuries, from eating a Polish Potato Pancake and making it a Chanukah tradition, to taking a popular Christmas-time toy called totum and making a game that tells the story of Chanukah.

That’s the way we survive as a people!

The original, the one, the only: Adam Sandler and The Chanukah Song, straight from SNL.

Boker Tov Boulder (as noted by Jewish Current Issues, Noah Pollak at the Corner, Mere Rhetoric and Daled Amos) collected a series of news items documenting what has been pledged to the PA over the past 3 years.

It’s quite an extensive list that Pollak observes:

While I freely admit to being terrible at math, by my estimation the total runs easily into the many billions of dollars.

To which Mere Rhetoric adds(sardonically):

Apparently electing an intransigent genocidal regime openly committed to the destruction of Western ally - pretty good way to get aid.

There have been a number of articles over the years that have looked at the bigger issue of Palestinian aid and finances.

In September 2004, Honest Reporting issued Understanding Palestinian Poverty that reported

Since the signing of the slo Accords in 1993, the international community has shown unprecedented generosity toward Palestinians, donating approximately $5 billion to the Palestinian Authority. The World Bank noted recently that ‘donor disbursements to the Palestinians currently amount to approximately $1 billion per year or $310 per person ― one of the highest per capita rates in the history of foreign assistance.’ (By comparison, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II provided $68 per year, in today’s dollars, to Europeans.)

Among other things, all this aid made Yasser Arafat a very wealthy man.

Rachel Ehrenfield provided a somewhat more exhaustive accounting of Arafat’s personal wealth.

Nor was Yasser Arafat the only official to benefit from international generosity as the late Michael Kelly wrote back in 1998 in Investing in Yasser Arafat.

THERE WAS A WONDERFUL MOMENT in the annals of diplomacy this week. Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, had come to town to attend an international conference convened by the White House to raise a new pile of money to give to President Arafat. And the conference had gone splendidly.Everyone had behaved perfectly fine; no one had so much as mentioned the inconvenient London Sunday Times story the day before, which said that the Palestinian Authority had swiped $20 million in British aid intended to build housing for the poor of Gaza, using the money instead to build luxury flats for Arafat’s military and bureaucratic elite. After a day of pleasantries, representatives of 43 nations had pledged $3 billion in new aid to the Palestinian Authority, including an extra $400 million from the U.S. president. Arafat saw that it was good. “I am satisfied with the reality of this conference,” he pronounced.

(Daniel Doron wrote of another, perverse, way well connected Palestinians benefited from “foreign aid.”)

But the top functionaries of the Palestinian Authority didn’t just accumulate their wealth through the generosity of foreign aid. The also earned their money the old fashioned way through monopolies. Ronen Bergman and David Ratner write in The Man who swallowed Gaza.

Rashid means monopolies. Simultaneously with the establishment of the Authority, its leaders decided to control several essential economic sectors through monopolies; and the rights to operate the monopolies were given to several of the Authority’s senior officials foremost among them Rashid. The owner of the monopoly buys the product over which he has control from the Israeli manufacturer or importer, and sells it in the territories for a much higher price. The profits finance Authority operations that the contributing nations refuse to fund, or they disappear that is to say, make their way into private pockets, as representatives of the contributing nations and members of the Palestinian parliament allege.

The leaders of the security services could also use their positions to augment their income.

Another way in which the security apparatuses finance their augmented activity is through the collection of unloading taxes. Rajoub and Dahlan control, in effect, all the discharging platforms at the transit points to the Palestinian Authority. Dahlan is also the owner of the loading pitchforks at the Erez checkpoint. Every merchant and truck owner must pay the preventive security apparatus a tithe in order to proceed. Sometimes, its done in a simpler fashion. An Israeli importer of cleaning products, who opened a branch in Gaza, was asked to pay $2,000, a “donation” to Force 17. A year ago,a rich Arab from East Jerusalem was asked to purchase 14 new jeeps, out of his own money, for Rajoub’s organization’s use.

What’s worth noting is that none of this behavior is new. Back in 1983, Daniel Pipes wrote “How important is the PLO?”

The benefits to the PLO have been staggering. Financial statistics cannot be specified, for the PLO does not circulate its budget, but published reports indicate that in recent years the organization received about $250 million yearly from Saudi Arabia and smaller amounts from other oil states, including $60 million a year from Kuwait. At a summit conference in Baghdad in 1978, the Arab states promised another $100 million annually. Non-Arab governments (such as the Soviet bloc) also gave generously; and if these insisted on cash for arms, third parties might be induced to pick up the tab, as in April 1982 when the Saudis promised $250 million to pay for weapons from Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany. When the PLO requested help from the Arab states last summer, the Algerian foreign minister called in the Soviet ambassador in Algiers at four in the morning and gave him a check for $20 million; the weapons reportedly arrived in Beirut several days later by air.About 5 to 10 percent of the pay of the 300,000 Palestinians working in the Gulf states is withheld by the governments there and earmarked for the PLO; were all of this money to reach its stated destination (which is not the case), it would provide the PLO with about another $250 million a year. Aid also comes from the farther away, from radical and Islamic groups around the world: in January 1983, for instance, the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement in Kuala Lumpur gave a check for $80,000 to the local PLO representative. Terrorist activities have also proved a source of funds; the PLO reportedly received $20 million in December 1975 for releasing the OPEC oil ministers it had helped take hostage.

With this capital, the PLO was able to start large-scale business enterprises. In Lebanon, it ran a conglomerate called Samad (”Steadfast”) whose 10,000 employees and estimated $40-million gross revenues in 1980 made it one of the country’s largest firms. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organizational member of the PLO, achieved a near-monopoly over steel products in South Lebanon during the late 1970s by importing steel from the Soviet bloc at concessionary prices and paying no import duties (the PLO controlled the ports of Sidon and Tyre). Its factory, the Modern Mechanized Establishment near Sidon, undercut competitors and drove them out of business; then it raised prices and reaped huge profits. Many Lebanese believed that predatory pricing was integral to the PLO’s plans to retain control over South Lebanon. In addition to its local investments-a hotel in Lebanon, a chicken farm in Syria-the PLO owns a portfolio of investments in the industrial states, including a disco club in Italy and an airline in Belgium.

The PLO also controlled most of the approximately $30 million a year sent by the Arab governments to the West Bank and Gaza, though on some occasions Arab states themselves became directly involved. For example, Mayor Elias Freij of Bethlehem received $600,000 from Kuwait in 1977, reportedly in exchange for refraining from speaking of peaceful coexistence with Israel.

All in all, the PLO’s annual budget in recent years has been estimated at about $1 billion, prompting Time to call it “probably the richest, best-financed revolutionary-terrorist organization in history.” Its leaders could enjoy an unusually opulent style of life; on one occasion, three PLO directors lost $250,000 of the organization’s money at the gambling tables. If Yasir ‘Arafat maintained an abstemious way of life, other of the top PLO brass were notorious for high living; Zuhayr Muhsin, head of As-Sa’iqa, was assassinated while residing in a luxury hotel on the Riviera.

Perhaps at some point the Palestinian Authority’s donors ought to have looked at the history and stopped funding the PA so generously. Sure someone who was generous could have said once that past performance isn’t a guarantee of future results. But once it was established that in this case the corrupt nature of the PLO (and PA) was confirmed donor countries just kept on giving.

Rather the world heard Arafat and his cohorts say

You owe me. Pay up. Or else.

And world listened. And it still listens, continuing to pay tributes to this corrupt organization.Salam Fayyad the new Prime Minister of the PA was cited in the past as trying to straighten up the PA’s tangled finances. But as Barry Rubin points out in You owe us bigtime: the distortion of Palestinian aid politics

But the icing on the cake is the phrase “previous regimes” being responsible for corruption as if the current leadership has nothing to do with it. The current prime minister, a professional economist, may not be corrupt but the PA regime today is a continuation of all the ones before. Personnel have not changed very much.

All the aid that’s currently being arranged will go for naught. It will enrich the top layer of Palestinian leadership. It will finance terror operations. It will not be used to build infrastructure or create an economy.

Foreign aid to the Palestinians has created an entitlement society. No doubt it makes the West and others feel good because they’re “doing something to help,” but they’re only helping a small fraction of Palestinian society. And they’re doing it again and again.

Until the Palestinians are held accountable for their corruption and terror there will never be peace. The latest round of donor promises shows that nothing has been learned from the last quarter century of experience.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Yes, Virginia, there is an anti-Israel bias, and this is the time of year that it becomes the most virulent. Let us take note of two amazing events in the beginning of the “Israel would make the Baby Jesus cry” season. First, an article in the UK Times that actually points out the bias. But I don’t think it counts, because I think I’ve read positive articles about Israel by Michael Gove before:

It has become almost as much a feature of seasonal journalism as stories about how Nativity plays are being subverted and commentaries on how commercialism is snuffing out the true meaning of the festival.

This year we’ve already had our first exercise in demonising Israel for its treatment of Bethlehem with the graffiti artist Banksy enjoying extensive coverage for his trip to decorate the security barrier near the town with his work. The message of Banksy’s work and the coverage it has generated is the same: oppressive Israel has snuffed the life out of the town where the Prince of Peace was born. Herod’s spirit lives on, even as the spirit of Christmas is struggling to survive.

The truth is very different. The parlous position of Palestinian Christians, indeed the difficult position of most Christians across the Arab world, is a consequence not of Israeli aggression but of growing Islamist influence. Israel goes out of its way to honour sites and traditions sacred to other faiths while the radicals who are driving Palestinian politics seek to create an Islamist state in which other faiths, if they survive at all, do so with the explicit subject status of dhimmis. But when it comes to Israel’s position in these matters it’s still a case of O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see them lie.

Next, we have the AFP pointing out that in spite of the separation fence “walling off” Bethlehem (and thus making the Baby Jesus cry), Bethlehem tourism is up 60%. And please note that the reason for the drop in tourism is mentioned five paragraphs down, but never seems to make it out of the news ghetto into the lead.

Tourism to Bethlehem has risen 60 percent in the run-up to Christmas, despite Israel’s separation barrier turning the birthplace of Christ into a “big prison”, its mayor said on Tuesday.

In his annual address as the small West Bank town — whose economy has been decimated by violence — prepares for Christmas, Victor Batarseh said tourism to Bethlehem had grown 60 percent in the past three months.

“In January 2007, 18,509 tourists visited the city of Bethlehem and starting September 2007, the number of tourists started to increase,” he said.

There were 64,420 tourists in November and “we are expecting even more this month,” the mayor said, attributing the increase to churches abroad projecting an image of safety and encouraging Christians to show solidarity and visit.

Before the Palestinian uprising broke out in September 2000, nearly a million tourists and Christian pilgrims visited Bethlehem each year.

Funny. You’d think the real reason for the lack of tourism—the Palestinians shooting and stabbing and blowing people up—might actually be the reason mentioned for the dropoff in, say, the lede. But then, you wouldn’t be a mainstream news editor. You’d be a blogger.

He slammed Israel’s separation barrier, which has sealed Bethlehem off from nearby Jerusalem helping to exacerbate high unemployment caused by dwindling tourism, Israeli closures and limits on Palestinian work permits.

“The cradle of our Lord Jesus Christ has turned into a big prison,” the mayor said.

There you go! The winner for Best “Makes the Baby Jesus Cry” Award goes to: The mayor of Bethlehem, who cannot admit that the reason there are so few Christians in Christianity’s birthplace is because they’ve been driven out by Muslims. (The AFP article refuses to acknowledge that as well, blaming the flight of Christians on Israel.)

And the usual crowd of idiots are in Bethlehem blaming Israel for all the world’s ills.

This is “Santa’s Ghetto,” an ongoing collaborative graffiti project that has evolved into the biggest artistic assault on Israel’s separation barrier and the latest hope among Bethlehem’s leaders to draw tourists back to this troubled town during the Christmas season.

Led by the enigmatic British artist known as Banksy, painters from around the world are adding works daily to the walls around Bethlehem in an attempt to draw attention to the impact the separation barrier has had on life in the Biblical birthplace of Jesus Christ.

The mayor of Bethlehem, he sure knows his talking points.

“I hope people will come visit because I don’t see how things can change for the citizens of Bethlehem as long as the wall is here,” Batarseh said.

“It’s excellent artwork,” he added.

And the McClatchy newspaper group, it sure knows its propaganda points.

Like the rest of the West Bank, Bethlehem was ravaged by the five-year Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 and saw hundreds of Israelis killed in suicide bombings and thousands of Palestinians killed in military raids.

That’s the final paragraph.

The media spin continues.