By PETER SMITH

Hanukkah — also spelled Chanukah or other transliterations from Hebrew — is Judaism’s “festival of lights.” On eight consecutive nightfalls, Jews gather with family and friends to light one additional candle in the menorah — a multibranched candelabra.

In Hebrew, Hanukkah means “dedication.” The holiday marks the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,200 years ago after a small group of Jewish fighters liberated it from occupying foreign forces.

With the tiny supply of ritually pure oil that they found in the temple, they lit the menorah. According to the Talmud, it miraculously remained lit for eight days. The ritual of lighting a nightly candle and the emphasis on cooking foods in oil, such as potato pancakes called latkes, memorialize this holiday.

Variations in the starting date

Hanukkah always begins on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev.

But the Jewish calendar, which is based on lunar cycles, is not in sync with the commonly used Gregorian calendar. Depending on the year, Hanukkah falls at various times between late November and late December.

This year, Hanukkah starts at sundown on Sunday, Dec. 14, and lasts through Dec. 22.

Traditionally, Hanukkah has not been a major holiday on the Jewish calendar, but it has taken on cultural prominence because it occurs at a time when many other people are preparing for Christmas.

Bringing light into the darkness

Jews across the religious observance spectrum — from Reform to Conservative to Orthodox — focus on the same theme of bringing light into the darkness and emphasizing that even a small, against-the-odds effort can have a transforming effect.

The Talmud, an ancient compendium of commentary and teachings on Jewish law, customs and Scripture, reflects a dispute over the order of lighting. But most people start with one candle and increase the lighting by an additional candle each night while reciting or chanting special blessings.

The candles are added from right to left, but lit from left to right on the menorah, thus always starting with the newest light. The special menorah used for Hanukkah has eight branches, with a ninth place for the candle called shamash from which all others are lit.

The tradition calls for candles with a real flame, although some also use electric ones in public displays, such as in hospitals, for safety reasons.

Celebrating by charitable giving and spreading the light

A menorah is lit in each household and traditionally is placed where it can be seen from the outside, such as a doorway or windowsill, to symbolize the spreading of God’s light to all nations.

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The lighting of menorahs in city streets and parks has become more prominent in recent years in countries around the world, including in front of public landmarks.

In addition to menorah lightings, giving to charity and social works are also part of the celebration for many, reflecting the belief that the Jewish people are called by God to help make the world better for all.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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It has become increasingly evident to our whole community that Saint Paul needs a strong, vibrant and growing downtown for the health and wellbeing of the entire city.

Before the pandemic, Downtown St. Paul carried only 12% of the citywide tax revenues compared to peer cities, which had an average of 22% of tax revenues. The goal should not be to simply recover these tax revenues, but to dramatically increase the percentage of the tax load carried by downtown.

Strategic investments will unlock a tremendous benefit to the whole city. It’s exciting to see the City of Saint Paul make a meaningful commitment to moving this work forward. The approved $5 million increase to the Department of Planning and Economic Development budget dedicated to downtown vitality and housing in the core signals that we’re treating this issue with the urgency and seriousness it deserves.

The reality is straightforward: We can’t afford to let obsolete and underused towers sit empty, dragging down confidence in the heart of our city. At the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance, we anticipated the necessity of this transition and started preparing. In March 2024, we released the Downtown Investment Strategy — a blueprint to dramatically increase density, vitality and desirability in downtown St. Paul. We also commissioned a feasibility study showing that many of downtown’s buildings have floor plates and infrastructure that make them strong candidates for more efficient conversion. That gives St. Paul a competitive advantage over many other cities wrestling with similar challenges.

And we’ve already seen what’s possible. Landmark Towers’ recent transformation and the nearly completed Stella Apartments, along with the dozens of conversions in Lowertown, show that converting obsolete office space into housing doesn’t just fill buildings, it fuels street-level activity, supports small businesses and strengthens the case for essential amenities like cafes, restaurants, grocers and pharmacies. With Hamm Building’s conversion tracking toward 2026, and the Galtier conversion not far behind, momentum is building.

But we know these projects and the activity and tax base they fuel are only the start toward advancing the health and wellbeing of our entire city.

Our Downtown Investment Strategy calls for adding 20,000 new residents to the core. With apartment occupancy rates at 96%, demand is clearly there. More people living downtown means a broader tax base, healthier retail and restaurant ecosystems and more activity on our sidewalks — one of the most effective ways to enhance safety.

This new investment is critical because it helps attract a wider range of developers and investors.

Downtown’s recovery won’t happen on the backs of a few committed partners. It will take a broad coalition. That’s why the Downtown Alliance is deeply involved in a community engagement process right now, gathering input, listening and shaping a shared vision for the future of our downtown. That work will guide not only us, but also future development teams looking to understand what our community wants for their city’s center.

When community, business, government and investment work in sync, we unlock real progress toward improving our city for the good of our residents, businesses and the entire region.

To be clear, this $5 million commitment is not enough to stimulate a strong and rapid recovery of tax base for downtown that is critical for the health and wellbeing of our city. We’ll need more resources from the City, County and State in order to realize the full economic power for our city and region. Our Downtown Investment Strategy specifically calls out key development strategies and assets critical to this effort, such as developing RiversEdge, renovation of the Grand Casino Arena Complex, and the development of Central Station for example. However, this important start sends a clear signal that Saint Paul is ready to do the hard and creative work needed to build a stronger, more resilient downtown and city as a whole.

If you want to get involved with this vision, the Downtown Alliance just launched Reimagine Downtown Saint Paul: Transforming the Core — a comprehensive, community-driven initiative designed to inform the future of downtown’s economic vitality and urban experience. Learn more and provide input in an online survey at downtownstpaul.com/reimagine.

Joe Spencer is president of the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit organization that represents downtown businesses, nonprofits, government entities, residents and entrepreneurs.

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Nothing about the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy should shock European leaders, still less the enthusiastic welcome that this confirmation of a revolution in U.S. foreign policy has received from Moscow.

It calls, after all, for a rupture in the Transatlantic Alliance that every Kremlin leader — with brief exceptions for Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin — has sought since 1945.

Why that is should be self-evident. Moscow has been fighting wars to expand or protect its westward borders and influence since at least the days of Peter the Great. U.S. interventions to help defeat Russia’s primary 20th century rival for continental dominance — Germany — were helpful to the Kremlin’s goals. America’s decision to stay on as guarantor of a new transatlantic “West” was not.

This much won’t be disputed by the U.S. strategy’s authors. It’s just that, unlike their predecessors, they believe American interests now align with Moscow’s when it comes to the European Union. Better it should be an atomized group of small- and medium-sized nations that can be pushed around and exploited for economic gain, than a $30 trillion-plus economic rival with potential to retaliate, especially on issues such as trade.

A second interest that President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin share in Europe is perhaps less obvious: Unseating the liberal, pluralist leaderships that continue to run most European states — because they pose a threat to the domestic political narratives that both are dependent on to stay in power. More bluntly: When it comes to the culture wars, Trump and Putin are allies; liberal Europe is the enemy.

The reason Putin was so triggered over Ukraine in 2013, when it sought to sign a trade deal with the EU, was that the Kremlin couldn’t afford to have so similar a neighbor achieve Polish-style prosperity and liberties in the bloc. What might Russians then think about the necessity of their own authoritarian system? Putin had to suppress a Russian pro-democracy movement less than two years before and could ill-afford for Ukraine to rekindle it by providing proof of concept.

Trump, likewise, needs liberal Europe to fail if he’s to persuade future voting majorities of Americans that he offers the only solution to their problems. Hence the extraordinary acknowledgment in Trump’s new security strategy that the U.S. feels it has the right and obligation to interfere in European politics to ensure that MAGA-style leaders come to power there, too.

Like so many ideologues, including Karl Marx, Trump and his co-authors are far better at diagnosing the ills of a troubled system than proposing effective remedies. It took decades for many on the left to realize that just because capitalism had exploitative and disruptive tendencies didn’t mean this must lead inevitably to proletarian revolution and socialist utopia. Similarly, I suspect it may take a while for the penny to drop on what the far right is offering today.

The attempt to close the vast gap that quickly opened between Marxist doctrine and reality led to industrial-scale Soviet gaslighting and repression. You can see echoes today.

To pick just one example, as early as February, Trump’s Vice President JD Vance took to Munich the new administration’s idea that it was here, in “woke” liberal Europe, that democracy and freedom of expression were under threat. Never mind that his own boss had sought to overturn an election he lost in 2020, was imposing personal political control over independent democratic institutions, was trampling over the constitutional separation of powers, and has since gone on to abuse the power of both the National Guard and federal funds to impose his will on cities and universities that disagree with him.

It simply isn’t true that you can restore democracy by bending all institutions to the will of a leader, or improve freedom of expression by suppressing academic independence. Nor can you deliver peace by demolishing international institutions and reverting to an age of great power spheres of influence. We know this from most of human history.

So, the gaslighting is needed to maintain these fictions. The same goes for Trump’s empty claims on bringing peace to wars that either continue or were already over, and in particular his casting of Europe and Ukraine as the villains of Putin’s 2022 invasion.

Viktor Orban has done the same in Hungary. Poland has shown how hard it is to restore the independence of courts and other institutions once lost, even if a political opposition can overcome a tilted playing field to regain power. From the UK to Germany, far right mini-Trumps are waiting in the wings to take power across Europe.

At least some will succeed, because the populist diagnosis of what ails liberal democracies is largely accurate. Europe is indeed weak. Its democracies are struggling to restore dynamism lost to years of disarmament, poor demographics, bloated welfare states and complacency over deindustrialization. Some insurgents from the right, like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, will prove astute political operators who reject populist policies they know can’t work once in office. Others won’t.

In the meantime, there’s nothing to suggest Europeans will have the courage to voluntarily cut their overdependence on U.S. arms and tech, a move fraught with economic risk from the trade war that inevitably would follow. Easier to go on pretending the U.S. is a briefly errant ally, because to do otherwise would involve alliance shifts and a butter-to-guns policy revolution so dramatic it would put Trump’s new doctrine in the shade.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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