The Jewish Socialist Group (JSG) held a Chanukah party on Sunday Dec 23. People who don't like the JSG have objected to this, mainly on the grounds that it was allegedly several days early. In other words, the claim goes, Chanukah this year begins on Dec 25 but this party was before Dec 25. Quite learned people including a KC have voiced this objection on X (formerly Twitter).
What's strange about the objection is that Jews have held Chanukah parties 'early' or even 'late' for a long time. My parents couldn't find a way to square their political beliefs with what they saw as religious ceremonies, celebrations, Holy Days etc. though there were remnants at Chanukah in that my father insisted on cooking latkes. (I had to grate the potatoes, he said, a principle based, I think, on a reading of Marx which said that children could and should shell peas. He never showed us this bit of Marx but he often quoted it when saying that my brother and I had to wash the dishes.)
Anyway, back with the allegation that the JSG held a Chanukah party 'early'. It took me about ten seconds of googling to find very religious Jews holding Chanukah parties early - particularly in the States. This should come as no surprise. It doesn't matter what orthodoxies and conformities that people invent, there are always others who ignore them or invent others. One tiny example: the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Christian tradition often/usually takes place on Christmas Eve. When I was at school (and because we broke up before Christmas Eve) the school did that Festival 'early'.
So why would these learned (and not-so-learned) people object to the JSG holding a Chanukah party 'early'? There's a principle here: 'any stick to beat a dog'. Once you've decided who is the dog, then any stick will do, even if it doesn't make sense, it's illogical, and the 'wrong' you've identified is committed by your side at the same time.
Meanwhile. the idea of demanding conformity in the 21st century is just a little bit on the sad side. As religions divide and change, as people invent new groups within religions or across religions, there are people standing in the middle demanding conformity to something. As people will know, the history of religions is dense with these pleas for this or that conformity at the very moment big divisions take place. The seventeenth century is one huge example for Christianity.
Further, I've seen in London alone that there are groups of Jews who have set up their own forms of meeting and celebrating the festivals and interpreting Judaism. There is no Jewish Pope to say they can't. Same goes for Christian groups I've heard about even though (of course) there is a Pope and the other established groups (Protestants, Evanglicals etc) have their religious leaders.
The JSG incidentally doesn't spring up out of nothing - not that that would be a bad thing in itself! It owes its roots and inspiration in part (perhaps mostly, as they can tell us better than I can) from the 'Jewish Labour Bund' commonly called the 'Bund'. There are brief summaries of them on wiki and many books. My mother's father, my father's father and my father's maternal grandfather were all involved with the Bund and its sister organisation the Workers' Circle or Workman's Circle or Arbeter Ring, though my parents' Communism (members of the Communist Party (1936-1957)) blotted out these traditions in our family (I mean the family of my parents, my brother and me). In fact, I think that my father's parents split over that kind of disagreement, and it's how my father ended up in England and his father stayed in the US...(!)
The histories of Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists hardly gets a hearing these days. There are several reasons for that, the main ones being the Holocaust, that wiped out many European Bundists and Jewish socialists. And the other is that the axis of Jewish identity and politics shifted once Israel was founded.
As I've recorded elsewhere but I'll tell it again. When I went to secondary school, I met non-Communist Jewish kids for the first time (!). (Our family circle and friends was full of Jewish Communists!) One of these non-Communist Jewish secondary school folks, was my friend Dave who told me that the good news that he had been on a kibbutz in Israel and that's how socialism was going to happen. I came home and told my father, who said, 'Who can be a member of these kibbutzim?' I went back and asked Dave. He explained to me that kibbutzim were Jewish (this is in about 1959/1960 when this conversation was taking place). I told my dad the news. The kibbutzim are for Jews. My father said, 'Socialism for one people? How does that work? Isn't socialism supposed to be for everyone?' (Apologies if you've heard/read me telling that story before.)
Anyway, in that little conversation (particularly the one (and others) that I had with Dave, are also reasons for how the conversation about Jewish socialism or socialism and Jews changed once Israel was founded.
Have a great holiday, Christmas, Chanukah, or any other festivity you fancy. 'Gut yontef (or yontov)' It means in Yiddish, literally, 'good holiday' and, as it happens, it was one of the bits of Yiddish that my father retained in spite of him not knowing what to do with the traditions. Enjoy!
