Past Hanukkah-related posts are collected here and links and there are more recent ones here and here.
Also, Haaretz has a recent piece by Rabbi Yehoshua Looks about one of the major characters in the story: On the eve of Hanukkah, a story of a fallen high priest. The tension in defining boundaries between religious and secular life and practice remains with us millennia after Jason the high priest built a contentious gymnasium in Jerusalem. Excerpts:
From the charcoal drawings of two warships and the inscriptions inside the tomb, one speculation is that Jason was a naval commander who sailed the coast of Egypt. But in her book "Doubt: A History," Jennifer Michael Hecht tells another story from that era, of a Jewish high priest named Jason who had lost his standing as he pandered to the pull of assimilation.This is a premium article and the full text may not be up for long, so read it now while you have the chance.
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According to Hecht, Antiochus retired the pro-Ptolemaic Jewish high priest, a son of High Priest Simon, replacing him with Simon's more progressive younger son Jason, who secured his selection with a bribe. Jason, who was born Joshua but, tellingly, chose to go by the Greek version of his name, already had a strong following of Jews who opposed the strict application of Jewish law. Jason, Hecht writes, quickly took steps to make the finer things of Greek culture available to Jews, and his first order of business was building a gymnasium in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount.
The attitude to these events, as recorded in the Book of Maccabees, is clear.
[...]
Ironically, today’s Maccabiah Games, also known as the Jewish Olympics, in its naming reflects a case of modern amnesia. What the games celebrate, the Greek ideals of physical skill and prowess, are in part, what the Maccabeans were fighting against. Metaphorically, Jason the high priest, buried in the tomb in the heart of modern day Jerusalem or wherever, is probably smiling.
