Debbie Diamond’s Chanukah Message for 2025

Have the lights of Hanukkah begun flickering for you? Mine have, despite the fortitude and resilience I’d like to think I have relied upon for the past several decades.

Being Jewish these days is not easy. I remember my mother telling a story of how she told an elementary school classmate one time that she was Baptist, not wanting to be questioned during the 1940s in Atlanta. I listened with discomfort as my grandmother told the story of her family moving to Birmingham for several years during the Leo Frank trial. My father spoke of his family leaving Latvia in the 1920s, not entirely certain of what had happened to his extended family during the Holocaust. I later found relevant information through an elderly cousin and Yad Vashem, but that story is for another day.

So, here we are in 2025, at a time that follows what many have called the “golden age of American jewry.” Yet for many Jewish people, including my father, they never fully trusted that antisemitism had gone away and would not rear its ugly head again. Despite my childhood protestations that “it’s not like that anymore and that the world had changed,” I’m afraid to say he may have been on to something.

Despite how different our world looks now, the patterns feel disturbingly familiar. The stories I once heard sounded like distant echoes from another lifetime, warnings from a harsher era. But lately, those echoes have grown louder. We see the news where Jewish students on college campuses are told to stay inside “for their own safety,” on social media where old stereotypes return with frightening speed, and in the uneasy silence of people who claim they oppose hate but look away when the target is us. The lessons many of our family members carried across continents and decades have come back into sharp focus: antisemitism does not disappear. It simply waits until the right moment.

What we are watching unfold now is hateful and often ignorant rhetoric. The language used today includes anti-Zionist slogans, as well as the old tropes. The platforms have changed to become digital, embracing the latest technology to reach people across the globe. Yet the strategy is ancient — isolate the Jews, question their belonging, and blame them for problems they did not create. You do not need a history book to recognize the pattern.

Hanukkah just feels different to me this year. The holiday has never been about grand miracles so much as it has been about human courage and the desire to bring light into the world. The Maccabees did not wait for the darkness to lift. They lit the oil in the menorah, expecting it to last one day. Instead, the light they brought into the Temple lasted eight days and was declared a miracle. And while I don’t subscribe to simply waiting for a miracle to turn around society, there is value in trusting that the Universe or Hashem has a grand plan in mind. Just as the Maccabees refused to let fear dictate their identity, we can gain strength in studying Torah, taking a Judaics class, or showing up at Shabbat services.

This year, our family will be lighting our menorahs with intention — not just to remember the past, but to push back against the shadows creeping into the present. I’m hoping others will do the same in their own way. Speak up when you hear antisemitism dismissed as a misunderstanding. Encourage your Jewish friends and family to proudly wear their Stars of David. Refuse to accept silence where moral clarity is needed.

If Hanukkah teaches us anything, it’s that a single flame can illuminate the dark, and many flames together can change it. So, light your menorah, open your windows, and let the world see who we are. Show up, speak out, and stand tall in a time that would prefer we shrink. The Maccabees did not wait for permission to be visible. Neither should we.

Debbie Diamond is a freelance writer for Atlanta Jewish Times.