Hamantaschen

4 5 1 4 1 2 1 . As hamantaschen subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. In the winter of 2021, not long after President Biden’s inauguration, I walked into a small house party while another woman was leaving in tears.

It seemed an outsize reaction to a bit of loving kitsch. But then a few weeks ago, I heard about something called the Maccabee Bar opening in New York City, and I understood. With Hebrew Hammer cocktails, wacky midcentury-looking dreidel wallpaper and a logo replete with that faux-Hebraic font, this bar is a temporary temple of Hanukkah kitsch. My initial response was: No, please, not now. American Jewish museums to the ascendancy of the everything bagel as everything meme.

To be sure, Christmas has its kitsch side but also its green-fronded gemütlichkeit, its hallowed midnight Mass. Jewish festival of light with a domesticated South American camelid. You can’t get away from the dreidel socks, the Judaic breakfast accessories, the snowmen wearing tallises, the mensches on benches. Some of this is an internet story — of Amazon and Etsy and Instagram shops, where any joke can be made into a T-shirt or 3-D printed into a functional menorah and sent to market in the space of days.

But in the case of Hanukkah kitsch specifically, history is significant. Before coming to America, Hanukkah was a minor and oft-overlooked holiday. In the 19th century, European Jews might improvise a menorah on strips of tin or a poked-out potato and call it a night. In a way, Hanukkah could take in this glut of stuff because the meaning of the holiday — whose story does not appear in the Hebrew Bible — has always been something of a fill in the blank.