Members of Turkey’s Jewish community and visitors gather around a Hanukkah menorah during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah at Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, Dec. 19, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Murad Sezer.

Ahead of this year’s celebration of Hanukkah, here are eight important facts about the holiday:

1. Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles, and Shavuot/Pentecost, which commemorate the liberation from slavery in Egypt to independence in the land of Israel, and unlike Purim, which commemorates liberation from a Persian attempt to annihilate the Jewish people of Persia.

2. According to an NBC news report on December 13, 2022, “An ancient treasure trove of silver coins dating back 2,200 years, found in a desert cave in Israel, could add crucial new evidence to support a story of Jewish rebellion …. The 15 silver coins were hidden [during] the Maccabean revolt from 167-160 B.C., when Jewish warriors rebelled against the Seleucid [Syrian] Empire….”

3. In 1777, Hanukkah candles were lit by a Jewish soldier, during the Valley Forge encampment, the turning point of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a player in the ratification of the US Constitution, wrote: “What shining examples of patriotism do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, the Maccabees and the illustrious princes and prophets among the Jews…”

4. According to Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben-Gurion: Hanukkah commemorates “the struggle of the Maccabees, which was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history, not merely a political-military struggle against foreign oppression. … Unlike many peoples, the meager Jewish people did not assimilate. The Jewish people prevailed, won, sustained and enhanced their independence and unique civilization. … It was the spirit of the people, rather than the establishment, which enabled the Hasmoneans to overcome one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history…” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22)

5. When ordered by Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid region to end the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer, and Akron, Shimon the Maccabee responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land. … We have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation (Book of Maccabees A: 15:33).”

Hanukkah highlights the centrality of the Land of Israel in the formation of Judaism and the Jewish people. The mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria (the West Bank) — the cradle of Jewish history, religion, culture and language — were the platform for the Maccabean military battles.

6. Hanukkah’s historical context is narrated in the Four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus, and The Wars of the Jews.

In 323 BCE, following the death of Alexander the Great (Alexander III, who held Judaism in high esteem), the Greek Empire was split into three independent and rival mini-empires: Greece, Seleucid/Syria, and Ptolemaic/Egypt.

In 175 BCE, the Seleucid/Syrian Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanes claimed the Land of Israel. He suspected that the Jews were allies of his Ptolemaic/Egyptian enemy. The Seleucid emperor was known for eccentric behavior, hence his name, Epiphanes, which means “divine manifestation.” He aimed to exterminate Judaism and convert Jews to Hellenism. In 169 BCE, he devastated Jerusalem, attempting to decimate the Jewish population, and outlaw the practice of Judaism.

In 166/7 BCE, a Jewish rebellion was led by the non-establishment Hasmonean (Maccabee) family from the rural town of Modi’in, half-way between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean. The rebellion was led by the head of the family and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan, and Eleazar, who fought the Seleucid occupier and restored Jewish independence. The Hasmonean dynasty was replete with external and internal wars and lasted until 37 BCE, when Herod the Great (a proxy of Rome) defeated Antigonus II Mattathias.

7. As was prophesized by the Prophet Hagai in 520 BCE, the re-inauguration of the Temple took place on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, which is the month of miracles, such as the post-flood appearance of Noah’s rainbow, the completion of the construction of the Holy Ark by Moses, the laying of the foundations of the Second Temple by Nehemiah, etc. The 25th Hebrew word in Genesis is “light,” and the 25th stop during the Exodus was Hashmona (the same Hebrew spelling as Hasmonean-Maccabees).

8. Hanukkah highlights the defeat of darkness, forgetfulness, disbelief, and pessimism, and the victory of light, commemoration, faith, defiance of odds, can-do mentality, and optimism. The first day of Hanukkah is celebrated when daylight hours are equal to darkness hours — and when moonlight is hardly noticed — ushering in brighter days.

The author is a commentator and former Israeli ambassador.

Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

This past week, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual round-up of journalists killed worldwide, declaring 2025 a “deadly year for journalists” driven by “hatred and impunity.”

Across global conflict zones, RSF recorded 67 journalists killed between December 1, 2024, and December 1, 2025. According to their tally, 29 of those deaths occurred in Gaza — an eye-catching 43 percent of all journalists killed “because of their profession.”

But RSF’s framing omits a crucial fact: in Gaza, many so-called “journalists” are not solely media workers at all, but documented members of terrorist organizations who operate under the guise of reporting.

Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter) says Israel “portrays journalists as terrorists” while describing Hamas operatives as “reporters.”

Hard to misrepresent men documented as being on Hamas’ payroll. pic.twitter.com/frITiG34hU

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 9, 2025

Urban warfare is inherently chaotic, and tragically, civilians — including journalists covering the fighting — can sometimes be caught in the crossfire.

Despite this reality, Israel has consistently worked to minimize civilian harm and does not intentionally target journalists or anyone else without a lawful military purpose. But when an individual is found to be operating as part of a terrorist organization and actively participating in hostilities, they are no longer considered a civilian under the laws of armed conflict.

Over the course of the war, it has become increasingly clear that Hamas has woven its propaganda strategy directly into the media sphere. Some of the “journalists” cited by advocacy groups were, in fact, dual-role operatives.

Hossam Shabat served as a sniper in Hamas’ Beit Hanoun Battalion. Anas Al-Sharif worked for Al Jazeera while simultaneously being employed by Hamas in the East Jabaliya Battalion. Yet both appear on RSF’s list of journalists “killed in the line of duty” during the Israel–Gaza war.

Their actual line of duty was not journalism, but active service within a terrorist organization.

It is highly likely that Al-Sharif and Shabat are counted in RSF’s annual tally of journalists killed. But this cannot be independently confirmed because RSF does not actually identify by name all of those it reports to have been killed. For an organization that claims to defend access to “free and reliable information,” the lack of basic transparency in its own reporting is a striking contradiction.

Even so, major news outlets rushed to amplify the headline, asserting that Israel is responsible for nearly half of all journalist deaths worldwide. The framing spoke volumes.

Haaretz led with Israel’s “attack in Gaza” as the explanation for journalists killed — recasting a defensive war launched after a brutal terror attack as an unprovoked Israeli offensive. The Irish Times and France24 likewise pushed the RSF roundup, while omitting the inconvenient fact that many of the individuals counted were terrorists masquerading as journalists.

Graph based on CPJ data from 2023-2025.

Of the 83 on the CPJ list, 56 are confirmed to be affiliated with Hamas, 21 with Islamic Jihad, and another 6 have ties to other terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah or Fatah.

Graph based on CPJ data from 2023-2025.

Thus, even though RSF has declined to publish a list of names, the available data from organizations that do offer transparency tells a very different story. CPJ’s publicly accessible information shows that many individuals labeled as “journalists” in Gaza also had direct ties to terrorist organizations. Likewise, a study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center examined 266 Gazan journalists killed during the war and found that 60 percent were operatives or had documented affiliations with terrorist groups. This directly contradicts the narrative advanced by RSF’s annual round-up.

RSF surely understood that releasing a report without sufficient underlying data to support its implicit claim that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists, is a journalistic failure in itself. By publishing the round-up without verifiable evidence, RSF created a vacuum — one that media outlets quickly filled by framing Israel as the primary aggressor while erasing the role of terrorist organizations entirely.

If organizations devoted to protecting journalistic integrity expect others to uphold standards, they must meet those standards themselves. When transparency disappears, facts blur, and an anti-Israel narrative fills the void.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

In a letter dated November 1861, General George B. McClellan — newly appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as commander of the Union Army — wrote to his wife Mary Ellen that “Mr. Lincoln is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.” 

McClellan’s undisguised disdain echoed a broader sentiment among the political and military elite, who badly misjudged Lincoln’s capacity to lead the United States in a moment of national crisis. In the years that followed, history would vindicate Lincoln as America’s greatest commander-in-chief — while McClellan’s own legacy was overshadowed by the very man he had once so casually disparaged.

McClellan was hardly the first person to look down on someone far greater than himself, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Take Ignaz Semmelweis, for example, the brilliant Hungarian physician whose simple, lifesaving idea should have made him a medical hero. 

In the 1840s, Semmelweiss researched the high incidence of women dying after childbirth in hospitals and concluded that it was caused by doctors moving straight from autopsies to maternity wards, thereby infecting mothers. A staggering one in every six mothers died due to this practice.

There was a simple solution, Semmelweis said: doctors needed to wash their hands so that ‘cadaverous particles’ — the term germs had not yet been invented — would be removed. But the response to his suggestion was not gratitude but outrage. One senior Viennese physician dismissed Semmelweis’s handwashing solution as “the outpourings of a disturbed mind.”

The hostility to Semmelweis grew, and it essentially ended his career, the man poised to save countless lives was literally ridiculed into obscurity. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where he died at the age of 47. Only decades later did the medical world finally admit that the “disturbed mind” had been right all along.

Semmelweis was not the only doctor ridiculed for seeing the truth too clearly. During the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, Dr. John Snow proposed an idea that all his colleagues considered utterly laughable: he argued that cholera wasn’t caused by “bad air” or mysterious atmospheric vapors, but by contaminated water. Today we don’t question this fact — but in mid-19th-century London, it was considered scientific heresy. 

Snow wasn’t put off easily. He painstakingly mapped cholera cases, eventually traced the outbreak to the Broad Street water pump, and persuaded local officials to remove its handle so no one could pump water there. The deaths plummeted almost immediately, but the medical establishment still refused to take him seriously.

The president of the General Board of Health dismissed Snow’s work as “mere hypothesis,” and another critic sneered that his theory “cannot be entertained in any scientific discussion.” Snow, like Semmelweis, was treated as an irritant rather than a visionary. Only years later, long after his early death at 45, did the world recognize that the man they had waved away as a crank had actually solved one of the great medical mysteries of all time.

This pattern of condescension was not limited to the medical world. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron and one of the most extraordinary minds of her generation — became fascinated by Charles Babbage’s proposed “analytical engine,” a mechanical device most people viewed as little more than an elaborate calculator. 

But Lovelace saw something far more revolutionary. In a set of notes that she appended to her translation of an Italian science paper, she suggested that this machine, if built according to her specifications, would be able to manipulate symbols, compose music, and even generate original ideas — concepts that today form the backbone of modern computing and, more recently, AI.

But her vision was far too radical for her contemporaries. One prominent engineer dismissed her ideas as “the wild fancies of a young woman,” and others insisted Lovelace simply did not understand the limits of machinery. Lovelace, like Semmelweis and Snow, was written off as someone who thought too strangely, too imaginatively, too far beyond the accepted boundaries. 

A century later, computer scientists rediscovered her work and suddenly realized that her “wild fancies” were, in fact, the earliest blueprint for the digital age. The woman whose insights were rudely dismissed in her lifetime became known as the world’s first computer programmer.

The dismissal of great people by their peers was not a phenomenon limited to the 19th century. History is replete with such examples, going all the way back to the Bible itself, with the most famous case appearing in Parshat Vayeishev. 

Long before Lincoln was dismissed by McClellan, long before Semmelweis was mocked as delusional, long before John Snow was waved away as a crank, and long before Ada Lovelace was written off as an over-imaginative dreamer, Joseph’s brothers concluded that he was an overblown egotist punching way above his weight. They saw his confidence and heard his dreams, and immediately decided he was an arrogant narcissist obsessed with visions of grandeur.

What they never paused to consider was that perhaps these dreams were not fantasies at all, but glimpses of a destiny that he alone could perceive. Their prejudices and preconceived notions of their little brother blinded them to the remarkable qualities standing right in front of them: Joseph’s intuition, his emotional intelligence, his spiritual imagination, his innate leadership — all of which would emerge in the concluding chapters of Genesis. 

Convinced they were dealing with an insufferable younger sibling who needed to be put in his place, they misread the situation entirely. In their rush to dismiss him, they failed to recognize that he was, in fact, the person who would one day save them all.

Malbim offers a psychologically astute insight that applies equally to all the examples throughout history: people interpret ambiguous information through the filter of their existing emotions. Because the brothers already viewed Joseph with suspicion, they didn’t read his dreams as neutral messages but as hostile declarations. 

Their own jealousy and insecurity shaped what they thought the dreams meant — and, by extension, who they believed Joseph was. Malbim points out that had they not been so entangled in their biases, they might have seen the dreams in an entirely different light.

Which brings us to the most unsettling question of all. If Lincoln could be written off as a “well-meaning baboon,” if Semmelweis could be mocked into madness, if John Snow could be dismissed as a crank, and if Ada Lovelace could be waved away as a fanciful young woman, how many other potential Josephs has history quietly buried? 

How many brilliant minds, original thinkers, and visionary spirits were crushed before their gifts could ever see daylight, not because they lacked greatness, but because those around them lacked the imagination to recognize it? 

Joseph survived his brothers’ attempts to dismiss him and ultimately rose to fulfill his destiny. But his story stands as a warning: when we assume we already know someone’s limits, we may be blinding ourselves to the greatness standing right in front of us. And the tragedy is not only what we fail to see — it’s what the world loses when a future savior is silenced before he ever has a chance to begin.

So here’s a challenge for us all: This week, champion a quiet contrarian in your own circle. Seek out someone with unconventional ideas, and nurture them. Who knows, you might just uncover the next great thinker whose insights can change the world. Let us learn from the past and ensure that no potential Joseph is buried under the weight of our doubts.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.