For all the coverage of the tragic Bondi Beach shooting, I’ve seen no attention paid to what Chanukah actually celebrates.

It is sadly ironic for a religious fundamentalist to murder Jews while they were celebrating religious fundamentalists who murdered Jews.

Chanukah celebrates the Maccabees, a group of religious zealots from the second century BC who fought in a Jewish civil war. On one side of that war were Jews who wanted to integrate into Hellenistic culture, and on the other were the Maccabees.

Both sides persecuted each other, but the Maccabees were particularly extreme, slaughtering all who would not comply with their fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism and forcibly circumcising their orphaned children.

Most Jews who celebrate Chanukah today don’t focus on this part of it, but rather the survival of their faith. Yet they won’t denounce the faith’s brutal history, and by refusing to do so, they embolden the many Jews who do celebrate this part of Chanukah’s history, for whom it inspires crimes against Palestinians and persecution against dissenting Jews.

If we want religious fundamentalist violence to stop, change can only start when religious moderates — Muslim or Jewish — stop celebrating it.

I wrote more about this shortly after October 7th. Learn the true history of Chanukah and why it must be abandoned: