Today, let’s talk lights.

In an industry devoted to the affects and manipulation of light, it is difficult to imagine our lives—much less our livelihood—without electricity. It is even more difficult to imagine that once upon a time, around the year 200 BCE, a small, but rebellious, band of brothers found God and the rededication of their temple in the simple miracle of sustained light.

For anyone who’s worked on a film—or in a film booth, for that matter—while being challenged with poor lighting, the sentiment may not be so difficult to imagine. Without light there is no film, and this is true through every stage of the production, distribution, and exhibition process. Light is literally how it all begins.

In this way, the history of the Jewish people—as related in Genesis—and the history of Film, both share the radical presence of light as a beginning to the creative process.

Chanukah, Hanukah, and even Hanukkah—all spellings apply—is the Festival of Lights, and provides the perfect excuse to celebrate Jewish contribution in film as we remember not only what light has done for us, but what we have done with light.

The history of Hollywood is very much a history of Jewish contribution in America.

From early on in the industry’s conception and development, interest from the American Jewish community was high. On account of the Yiddish Theatre, and the large economic role entertainment already served for the Jewish community, the advent of the “Motion Picture” medium, as a means for display, was mostly a technological development in what was anything but a foreign enterprise.

Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldfish—later Goldwyn—and Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner—founders of Warner Brothers Pictures—are some of the more notable Jewish entrepreneurs in the era of early Hollywood, however, the presence of Jews and their contribution in film is noticeable even today.

In today's motion picture industry where many of our most distinguished American actors, directors, writers, producers, cinematographers, and lighting designers are Jewish, the role that Jews play in the motion picture industry is, perhaps, only out-shadowed by the myriad anti-Semitic conspiracies that surround the topic. And, yet, the association of Jews and Hollywood—for better or worse—is a trope as familiar to the American people as the movies it has made and distributed.

Even in the midst of a holiday season in full swing, with nary a menorah to light up our screens, the theatres testify a Jewish contribution that might only prove redundant, if explicitly made by the film’s content. Rather, we need only to see any number of the Christmas blockbusters this year for a taste of Jewish ingenuity.

For eight days and eight nights, beginning today, the Jewish people will celebrate their own security by remembering a time when the security of light meant the presence of God. And today, for millions of people, in movie houses across the country, or with movie cameras and editing booths across the world, light proves itself no less vital—its successful execution, and what it presents, no less miraculous.