Hanukkah in America: A History (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)
*Starred Review* Religiously, Hanukkah is considered a minor Jewish festival. Ashton’s wonderfully readable, fact-packed history demonstrates, however, that in the U.S., Hanukkah isn’t minor at all. From at least the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been a vehicle for asserting solidarity among a never-large American minority and establishing that minority’s credentials as faithful Americans as well as faithful Jews. Further, Ashton asserts, Hanukkah has always played a role in response to the successive challenges American Jews have faced over the course of the last century and a half, as their numbers and varieties of religious practice varied with changes in immigration (wide open, then severely restricted), assimilation (increasingly tolerated), and family structures (as affected, especially, by better contraception and easier divorce). Fueling Hanukkah’s success in both functions is its longtime association with bolstering the family, especially through the games, songs, school pageants, plays, and gift giving deliberately developed to popularize it. The scholarship base of Ashton’s account is, judging from the enormous number of reference notes, massive; the illustrations scattered throughout the text are always pertinent; and Ashton’s evenhandedness most admirable. --Ray Olson