A Hanukkah zine collection
I created this collection of zines in 2018 as a way to talk about what the holiday commemorates and how it fits into the American winter holiday season. The eight zines cover:
- Hanukkah's Schedule
- How to Spell Hanukkah
- The Military-Industrial Complex's Favorite Jewish Holiday
- All About Latkes
- Hanukkah is Apocryphal
- Doing the Math for Dreidel
- Hanukkah at the White House
- Wait, the Romans Aren't the Bad Guys in the Story of Hanukkah?
All eight zines are available to download as a printable set through itch.io.
Miranda Sullivan, New Voices’ then-columnist covering Jewish zines, wrote a kind review of my zines in 2021: Start Preparing Early for An Anti-Nationalist Hanukkah: A Zine Review. Here’s a snippet from Miranda’s review:
For the most part, Bram presents a collection that prompts the reader to create their own modern commentary rather than presenting a monolithic view of the holiday. After reading these zines, to me it’s clear that Hanukkah is being used by today’s American politicians to punch a hole in their “I’m not discriminatory I have (fill in the blank) friends!” card. It also made me think about the close relationship between Zionist settler-colonialism and the United States’ military industrial complex.
Having this review in New Voices means a lot to me, because one of the first pieces I ever wrote about my Jewish experiences was for New Voices. The publication is written by college students and way back in the day, when I was still in college, I wrote an article about Jewish life at the University of Tulsa.
That article doesn’t appear on the New Voices website these days (which is for the best; I have both progressed as a writer and in my ability to think critically about religion, education, and which Jewish organizations I personally want to affiliate with). If you really want to see how much my writing has improved, though, I suppose you can look at this copy on the Wayback Machine.
Honestly, though, a better use of your time is checking out Miranda’s other columns on Jewish zines, especially the review of The Jewish American Princess Zine, which dives deep into the racial politics of the Jewish American Princess stereotype.