Television Finally Celebrates Being Jewish : Hanukkah: The holiday has long been miscast as the other Christmas; now its religious significance shines on its own.

The holiday season is on us full force, not only in suburban malls and city window-dressings, but also in our living rooms each evening, as popular television shows bring on the obligatory holiday cheer, played out by our favorite TV characters. Seasonal story lines fill programs with Christmas miracles and heightened moral messages.

Yet something is different in TV’s recent crop of holiday shows. Ever-reflective of life around it, television is presenting new scenarios that bespeak a changing social and religious landscape--telescoped and highlighted this time of year with two wholly different holidays, Christmas and Hanukkah.

For much of TV’s early years, December dramas were all about Christmas. Although Jewish themes and characters appeared more frequently on early television than is widely believed, Hanukkah--the Jewish holiday of national redemption and religious freedom--was virtually unmentioned.

Not until the late 1960s and early 1970s did TV begin to take note of Hanukkah, due to the growing commercialization of Christmas and a tandem popularization of Hanukkah, along with a rise in intermarriage that brought the holiday into the American lexicon.

But this was no real Hanukkah. On popular TV, it was a “Jewish Christmas,” as the medium blurred the two holidays and abnegated the religious and historical significance of each.

For many Jewish producers and writers creating such shows, it seemed there was new comfort in mentioning Hanukkah, but only as a foil to demonstrate how similar we all are, how alike Jews are to Gentiles. For those seeking their own assimilation into American culture, it was a useful notion: that the two distinct holidays comprised one grand American Decemberfest.

But watershed events of the 1970s changed all this. The phenomenal success of “Roots” suddenly made ethnicity permissible, even desirable, TV fare. It was now “in” to be demonstrably ethnic, to be a hyphenated American, both on screen and off.

At the same time, Hollywood’s Jews, having achieved homogenization (Los Angeles holds the nation’s highest intermarriage rate, 70%) faced an alarming reality: They no longer possessed any distinguishing identity. As they and the characters they created married into Gentile families and looked, talked and celebrated like everyone else, a seismic question arose: “Now that we are like everyone else, who are we?”

Television viewers began to see this soul-searching played out by TV’s Jewish characters. Like many baby-boomers viewing “thirtysomething”--alienated from their roots but now reclaiming them--Michael Steadman spent several episodes pondering the role of his Jewish identity in his intermarriage.

This desire to extract some distinguishable ethnic-religious identity would lead to an unraveling of the TV-melded Christmas-Hanukkah holiday, as a clearer picture of the Jewish holiday, celebrated by Jewish characters, emerged.

Among them, Joel Fleischman of “Northern Exposure” succinctly voiced this new expression of Jewish identity. Isolated in an Alaskan town, Fleischman brings a Christmas tree into his home, but deposits it by show’s end on the lawn of a Christian friend. “It belongs to you,” he says, “Scratch a plum pudding and there’s a matzo ball underneath. I’m a Jew. That’s all there is to it.”

Even TV’s intermarrieds no longer simplistically equate the holidays. A Jewish partner on “The Commish” tells her young son--as the family lights the menorah--about raising him sans Christmas tree because “we have a beautiful tradition and wanted you raised with as little confusion as possible.” By depicting the celebration of one holiday without an obligatory and superficial nod to the other, television has come to acknowledge and respect the unique spiritual messages of each.

The trend continues apace as a “Sisters” episode, scheduled to air Saturday, the first night of Hanukkah, portrays a formerly intermarried couple (she converted to Judaism) facing an outbreak of anti-Semitism. With Hanukkah the overarching metaphor motivating characters to uphold their Jewish identity and confront bigotry, the ancient story in which the few triumph against the many is given contemporary significance and the distinctiveness denied it during most of television history.