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The Festival of Darkness: On the Primordial Origins of Chanukah

Hosted By: Orange County Community Scholar Program (CSP)

Why do all religions have a holiday in the dead of winter? When was the first Chanukah ever celebrated? And how does this explain the talmudic debate over the candles we light? Exploring the most mythic of Jewish holidays through the Bible and Apocrypha, Talmud and New Testament.

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Teacher

Gila Fine

Gila Fine is a lecturer of rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, exploring the tales of the Talmud through philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and pop culture. She serves on the faculties of the Nachshon Project, Amudim Seminary, the Tikvah Scholars Program, the London School of Jewish Studies, the Community Scholar Program, and WebYeshiva, and has taught thousands of students at conferences, campuses, and communities across the Jewish world. As editor-in-chief of Maggid Books, Gila worked closely with such leading scholars as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, publishing over 100 titles of contemporary Jewish thought, including several bestsellers and eight National Jewish Book Award winners. She is also the former editor of Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation. Her work has been featured in the BBC, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, Tradition Journal, Jewish News, and The Jewish Chronicle (which selected her as one of the ten most influential Brits in Israel). Haaretz has called her “a young woman on her way to becoming one of the more outstanding Jewish thinkers of the next generation.
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Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

External texts from the Second Temple period.

Ancient Jewish Texts

This is an overview of ancient texts that came after the bible but before rabbinic literature.

Teaching Our Larger Communities About Chanukah

Last year, just before Chanukah, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman came to me for some assistance.  Her four-year-old daughter ...