The Jewish comedian Adam Sandler recently performed an updated version of his 1994 “Hanukkah Song.” For Andrew Silow-Carroll, the song epitomizes the current American environment, in which being Jewish has a certain cachet (as long as one doesn’t express strong support for Israel). But being cool isn’t always a good thing:

[The] “Hanukkah Song” . . . is essentially a list of Jewish celebrities, from Dinah Shore and William Shatner to Goldie Hawn and Henry Winkler. The song is an unabashed expression of Jewish pride, going so far as to “out” celebrities who tended not to have advertised their Jewishness. It makes Jewish ethnicity “cool” by identifying it with secular cultural heroes. . . . It rejects the idea that Judaism is a stigma, or a burden, or the very thing that separates you from the mainstream.

At the same time, I worry that the song speaks for generations for whom Judaism may not be a stigma nor a burden but may not be very distinctive, either. Sandler’s celebrities are cool because they happen to be Jewish, not because they represent a particular Jewish way of being in the world. . . .

[I]n some ways the “Hanukkah Song” is the Hanukkah of songs. Hanukkah’s integrity as a Jewish holy period has been overshadowed by its role as a consolation prize to Jews left out of the Christmas hoopla. Hanukkah kitsch affirms Jewishness in the mainstream—see the blue and silver decorations right next to the green and red ones!—without conveying much sense of what we’re celebrating or why. Pride is a wonderful thing—but pride without meaning or responsibility is a hollow sort of cool.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.