When did Hanukkah become important to American Jews?

[DSeid]

@cmkeller

DSeid:

I don’t see any cites in the site you linked to that offer any proof that the miracle of the oil was a later addition. He just asserts it, as far as I can tell.

Maybe this is more to your liking.

As a matter of fact there are no primary sources in our cannon referencing the oil story other than a brief tertiary source: a Talmudic reference with the classic argument between Hillel and Shamai as to how we light the Menorah. …

… The Pharisees had another problem as well. There were many Jews who adopted the celebration of lights, imported and popularized by the Greeks to celebrate the winter solstice. Sounds familiar? The Pharisees the forerunners to rabbinic Judaism ingeniously incorporated the lights into the Chanukah story, thus co-opting Jews into a massive celebration and at the same time cutting the legs out from under their rivals, the Sadducees (Constantine did the same thing by incorporating the pagan Christmas tree into Christmas celebration thereby co-opting the pagans). …

Or this?

The story of Hanukkah is preserved in the books of the First and Second Maccabees. These books are not part of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible); they are apocryphal books instead. The miracle of the one-day supply of oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud, written about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees. [7] … The story of Hanukkah is alluded to in the book of 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees. The eight-day rededication of the temple is described in 1 Maccabees 4:36 et seq, though the name of the festival and the miracle of the lights do not appear here.

[Johanna]

@DSeid

It’s no more a coincidence that Hanukah is celebrated with lights around Winter Solstice than it is a coincidence that Christmas has lights and is around Winter Solstice. In both cases you had people already doing something, lighting candles around Winter Solstice, and prevailing culture repurposed the action to a new mythology (and no offense intended to religious Christians, “mythology” does not necessarily mean fictional).

So… if I understand you… ancient Jews had been unofficially practicing a pagan ritual, and then they institutionalized it with the explanation “We do this to commemorate how we kicked the pagans’ butts!”…?