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Hamas and the Lesson of Hanukkah
(Wall Street Journal) Liel Leibovitz - Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, began Dec. 7: two months after Hamas brutally murdered some 1,200 men, women and children in Israel. The U.S. post-Oct. 7 is a different country for secular Jews, many of whom now yearn for deeper connections to their past and to the stories that have bound them as a people for millennia. Before Oct. 7, many of us lived lives of quiet and content assimilation. Then came the attack, and anti-Israel activists trapped and, in some cases, assaulted Jewish students on college campuses. The press has related Hamas' propaganda as news. Thousands of our neighbors have waved Palestinian flags and cheered for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state. American Jews are becoming much more comfortable than ever setting themselves apart. You can see them filing into synagogues they'd never visited before, or buying Star of David necklaces to make sure they're easily identified as Jews, even though or precisely because they may pay for it with a nasty look or worse. You can read their posts on social media helping one another recover from the betrayal of so many people they once considered friends. Last month, nearly 300,000 of them gathered on the National Mall in Washington - the largest pro-Israel gathering in American history - to make sure they were counted as Jews. The writer is editor at large of Tablet.