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.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
