Oy Gevalt: Hallmark’s Love, Lights, Hanukkah!

If Hallmark’s Love, Lights, Hanukkah! (2020) is your maiden exposure to Jews and our religious customs, you will think we’re unfailingly cheerful moth people, strangely drawn to lights. And, perhaps more confusingly, that we’re obsessed with rudimentary math. The film’s cozy Jewish family, the Bermans, spend an inordinate amount of time counting and beaming while staring endlessly at candles and electric menorahs, the balance of their energy devoted to gently bickering while schmearing bagels and eating brisket. There are evangelical Christians somewhere in the United States who reluctantly watched this and thought to themselves, “Oh, so that’s why they’re all accountants!”

Our first groan of “Oy!” arrives immediately: Hanukkah! opens with closeups of spinning dreidels. You would never guess from this movie that most children are not enthralled by dreidels and that few Jewish women collect and display dreidels like Precious Moments figurines. Or that it would be kind of odd for a grandma to excitedly announce that the gifts are beside the menorah—Hanukkah gifts aren’t akin to Christmas gifts and menorahs are not like Christmas trees. If they were placed too closely together, at least in my childhood home, it would’ve taken about two seconds before my brother and cousins accidentally set everything aflame with their roughhousing.

To help make viewers feel less self-conscious about their lack of familiarity with Jewish traditions, we are given an equally clueless heroine, Christina Rossi (Mia Kirshner, who I’ve defended since her Jenny Schecter days on The L Word). A bereaved chef who recently assumed control of her late mother’s Italian restaurant in Cleveland, Christina’s been single since her fiancé broke off a four-year engagement over the telephone. When her sympathetic best friend Janet (Brandi Alexander) asks if she has a Christmas wish, Christina replies “The holidays are gonna be pretty lonely without any family this year. So I guess that would be my wish. Some people to love.”

Conveniently, she’s also an adoptee who just took an ancestry test and is awaiting the results—while fantasizing about Italian lineage: “I could be related to Armani or Versace. Or I could have this big family with a villa in Tuscany…” Or she could have a Jewish birth mother in Shaker Heights. Enter Ruth Berman (Hallmark captive Marilu Henner), whose short-lived marriage as an exchange student in Italy produced a secret child. Becky (Advah Soudack), Ruth’s daughter from a second marriage, finds Christina online and initially assumes they’re cousins. She and brother Scott (David Kaye) are shocked when Ruth comes clean, but they are instantly eager to welcome their newfound sibling into the family fold.

Love, Lights, Hanukkah! is blissfully lacking in family drama, instead offering a soupçon of romantic tension in the form of David Singer (Ben Savage), a food writer and close friend of the Bermans. Christina hasn’t forgotten that he once wrote a column declaring her lasagna uninspired, but even this isn’t a dealbreaker, as David admits “Sometimes I can go a little too far. You know, I get a little too passionate about food.” Alas, the two register more as friends or siblings than love interests, which mostly leaves us to watch as Kirshner looks for ways to make the lonely and aggressively needy Christina a bit more interesting.

Christmas-crazed, she buys wreaths by the armful and lavishes her half-siblings with extravagant gifts. Just as enthusiastically, she resolves to experience more of her heritage (how is a chef unfamiliar with challah?), even as she plans a traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes for the restaurant. “I don’t know anything about being Jewish and now I find out it’s 50% of who I am,” she despairs to Janet. “And now I have to learn a whole other holiday and all the traditions and I’m guessing it probably doesn’t involve lawn ornaments.” (Indeed it doesn’t, though that doesn’t stop Ruth and Christina from overdoing it with blue and white decor.)

The whole gang pitches in to educate her, providing stilted explanations of everything from the shamash to the symbolism of the eight branches of the menorah and the significance of frying latkes in oil. “Tonight is the first night, so we only light the first candle,” her niece advises. In case the concept wasn’t clear, we revisit the tutorial on night four. As a primer on the holiday, Love, Lights, Hanukkah! is baffling at best, the cinematic equivalent of Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake and a demonstration of the perils of mindlessly equating Hanukkah to Christmas. But it’s always nice to see Kirshner, even when she isn’t following Karina Lombard into a bathroom. And not even Mayim Bialik’s holiday movie gave viewers instructions on adding a little phlegm to their pronunciation of “Baruch atah Adonai.”

Streaming and DVD availability

Love, Lights, Hanukkah! is available on DVD and you can stream it at Amazon with a free seven-day trial of Hallmark Movies Now.

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… But wait, there’s more!

Here’s the Hallmark-unfriendly side of interfaith unions. Like the fictional Christina, my mother is Jewish and my father is not. This troubled various relatives, some of whom wouldn’t attend their wedding. My maternal grandfather dutifully walked his daughter down the aisle, but once I was born he grew concerned that my father’s background would have a deleterious effect on my Jewish identity.

His solution was not to make a big to-do over Hanukkah, which he could barely be bothered to observe, but to assign me childhood reading like The Jewish Catastrophe in Europe. He wanted me to see photos of starvation in the ghettos, of concentration camp prisoners being forced to dig their own mass graves. (He also sent me home with lighter reading by his favorite Jewish authors.) And he stressed that my father’s ancestry wouldn’t have saved my hide in Nazi Germany.

If Hallmark ever wants to take a walk on the wild side and cast Mandy Patinkin as an eccentric grandpa who encourages his young granddaughter to watch The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, my contact information is floating around here somewhere.