One of the paradoxes of Chanukah is that it is celebrated most avidly by assimilated Jews, who are most likely to live in non-Jewish neighborhoods and to feel the need for a substitute Christmas. The irony, of course, is that Chanukah is a celebration of the victory of fundamentalism over assimilation. The heroes of the Chanukah story, the Maccabees, were religious zealots; their enemies were as much the outward-looking Hellenistic Jews as the Seleucid monarchy. As a modern Jew who treasures the fusion of Jewish tradition and ethics with the limitless horizons of Western civilization, Chanukah seems to me a distinctly ambivalent holiday. I've always had a nagging suspicion that, had I been alive at the time of the Maccabees, I would not have been on their side.

Imshin responds:

He points out that what was happening was an attempt of cultural genocide. And this is exactly the point. In those days, you were who you worshipped. Secularism didn’t exist. Nationalism didn’t exist. Cultural genocide, as Jonathan calls it, was standard procedure for dealing with conquered peoples.

Jonathan responds to Imshin:

Hellenism . . . was a secular idea, with a philosophy independent of any local gods. Had Judaism still been a mere tribal religion, it would have posed no threat to the prevailing ideas in the rest of the Mediterranean world; had Hellenism been nothing more than worship of the Greek gods, it would have posed little danger to Judaism.

By Maccabean times, however, the two ideas were in collision; Hellenistic philosophy had spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and there were Jews in Alexandria and even Rome. If Judaism could take hold in Alexandria, then why not in Antioch? The aim of the Seleucid persecution was to destroy an idea that had the potential to spread throughout the Mediterranean world and replace it with another. It was cultural genocide on a scale never before attempted - an attempt to stamp out the worship of a god in its homeland. The conflict between the Maccabees and the Seleucids might in fact be regarded as the first major war of ideology.

This argument plays out in how many modern liberal Jews are conflicted about Israel, as Richard Silverstein describes. You can see this dialectic in the vociferous discussions about the movie “Munich.” When we are actors in history, when we have agency - in other words, in the real world where there is no perfect good - we have to make imperfect and agonizing decisions in favor of the better over the worse, and hindsight will always show a rosy potential future that we failed to achieve.

We Jews do like to think that when we have a chance to make history, we can do it better than all those callous brutal gentiles. The ways Jews have handled our moral choices compares favorably to most of the world's peoples, but we want to be perfect. This desire for perfection can be seen as a Lefty permutation of our ancient bias - which the Left would call racist in any other context - that we are better than everyone else.