Who Really Won at Hanukkah? The Greeks or the Jews?

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 • 1 Tevet 5786

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Join Mishkon's Adult Education Committee on Zoom for a Community Scholar Program presentation. We will watch Clive Lawton's lecture Who Really Won at Hanukkah? The Greeks or the Jews?

Join with the one-click Zoom link HERE.

Here's the Chanukah story we all know...

'The Jews were being occupied and oppressed by the Greeks, who wanted them to take up Greek practices and give up Judaism. In heroic battles, the Jews, against insuperable odds, defeated their Greek enemies, threw them out of Israel, and declared independence. They miraculously relit the Temple lamp with oil that lasted eight days — thus our eight-day festival of Chanukah — and ever since, to celebrate this, we've lit our eight-branched Hanukkiah in the window of our homes, one extra candle a night till all are lit.

But not so fast...

Clive will explore how nearly every phrase in this account is at least challengeable and in many cases simply downright wrong. Right at the core of the session, Clive will ask, Was there a victory at all, and if so, who won what?

Honored by the Queen in 2016 for services to "Education and the Jewish community," voted No. 18 in the UK’s Jewish Power 100 list and awarded the Max Fisher International Prize for Jewish Education by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, and CSP’s 11th Annual One Month Scholar in January 2012, Clive Lawton is CEO of the Commonwealth Jewish Council and scholar-in-residence at JW3, London's flagship JCC (of which he was a founding trustee) and an internationally active management and education consultant. He was co-founder of Limmud, the internationally renowned Jewish adult education movement and worked for it in senior roles from 1999 till 2016. He has been a high school principal, Director of Education for the City of Liverpool, a governor of the Metropolitan Police, Chair of a Hospital Trust, a patron of the Jewish AIDS Trust, on the Editorial Board of Jewish Renaissance, president of the Shap Working Party on Education in World Religions, and for over a decade Chair of Tzedek, (a Third World development charity).