January, 2020 | Chris Aldrich

Listened to The Hidden Truths of Hanukkah from On the Media | WNYC Studios

A special history lesson in time for the holidays.

Today is Christmas, but it's also Hanukkah — the Jewish festival of lights. With its emphasis on present-giving, dreidel games and sweet treats, the holiday seems to be oriented towards kids. Even the story of Hanukkah has had its edges shaved down over time. Ostensibly, the holiday is a celebration of a victory against an oppressive Greek regime in Palestine over two thousand years ago, the miracle of oil that lit Jerusalem's holy temple for 8 days and nights, and the perseverance of the Jewish faith against all odds.

According to Rabbi James Ponet, Emeritus Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain at Yale University, the kid-friendly Hanukkah mythology has obscured the thorny historical details that offer deeper truths about what it means to be a Jew. In his 2005 Slate piece, "Hanukkah as Jewish Civil War," Ponet looked at the often-overlooked Jew-on-Jew violence that under-girds the Hanukkah story. In 2018, he and Brooke discussed how this civil war lives on in Jewish views on Israel, and how the tension between assimilation and tradition came to define the Jewish people. We're re-releasing it today in time for the holidays.

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Tournez à gauche | alt-wrong (Twitter)

“So, RSS fans, particularly those who wish google hadn't shuttered reader: what would you pay to have it back as an indieweb project?”

I’d definitely go up to the $75/year range for a solid full-featured reader like Feedly or Inoreader but that included Micropub and Microsub infrastructure. (See also Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader.)

Looking at the current responses it seems like most respondents don’t have a very solid conceptualization of how to define “indieweb”. Almost none of the products mentioned in your thread are IndieWeb from my perspective. Most of them are corporately owned data silos.

I have to admit that getting me to switch would be pretty hard, it would need to be worth the hassle of switching (losing read status and old articles history, missing apps/integrations), given that I understand feed wrangler to be indieweb. Good luck if you decide to go ahead!

— Jean Hominal (@jhominal) December 30, 2019

To me IndieWeb needs to have a focus on allowing the user to keep and own big portions of their data. Things like read status and old articles history should be owned by the user and not by a third party. Readers that do this are just as bad as Google Reader which took that data down when they closed.

If you’re using the IndieWeb.org definition of a reader, would you be considering building a Microsub server, Microsub client, or both?