Nowadays, we take Wikipedia’s personal life section and JewOrNotJew.com for granted. But back in 1995, it wasn’t always easy to fact-check how Jewish someone was, even if you were an SNL comedian.
That’s why Adam Sandler’s original “The Chanukah Song,” arguably one of the most well-known American songs about the Jewish Festival of Lights (where “Instead of one day of presents/We have eight crazy nights,” as Sandler sings), unfortunately, contains some factual errors. In interviews over the years, Sandler admitted that he did his best to fact-check the song but that some errors snuck through.
And one of the subjects of those errors was Mr. Indiana Jones himself, the one and only Harrison Ford. In that original song, Sandler sings: “Harrison Ford’s a quarter Jewish, not too shabby.”
But when Ford first ran into Sandler after the song was released, he couldn’t help but correct him with a very succinct (perhaps Han Solo-esque?) “half!” the comedian and “Jay Kelly” star recalled in a 2022 episode of Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused.”
Ford’s mother is, indeed, Jewish, so he is (according to strict interpretations of Jewish law), fully Jewish. Dorothy Nidelman, born in Union, New Jersey, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. A former radio actress, Ford once joked that she was an amazing mother and terrible cook. Harrison may have been named after her late father, Harry Nidelman, who died in 1919. His father had German and Irish Catholic heritage, and they raised Ford and his brother in a secular, “liberal” house. The actor once joked that “as a man, I’ve always felt Irish; as an actor, I’ve always felt Jewish.” Which means we mostly see his Jewish side, and boy, is it a good side.
Now, Ford isn’t the only person whose exact Jewish identity Sandler got wrong. Another one is basefall Hall of Famer Rod Carew. “He converted!” Sandler quips in the song; well, turns out, not so much.
“I was about to convert, and I never did,” Carew told TMZ in 2012. “I think Adam found out about it.”
The two later discussed the mix-up and even struck a friendship over it. Carew’s first wife, Marilynn Levy, was Jewish, and the family belonged to a temple and raised their three daughters Jewish. And while the baseball player was known to sometimes wear a chai necklace, he never officially became a Jew himself.
Another mix-up almost got Sandler and his friend, Rob Schneider, involved in a brawl. Apparently, the “owner of the Seattle Supersonic-ahs” at the time of the song’s release did not, in fact, celebrate Hanukkah. While the team’s original owners were indeed Jewish, Bill Ackerley, the owner of the team back in 1995, was not, and tried to get Sandler to “86” the song when he ran into him at a restaurant. “You say that I’m a Jew, I’m not a Jew,” Sandler recalled him saying in an interview with Howard Stern.
While Sandler didn’t really want to engage, Schneider was infuriated. “What’s the difference?” Schneider asked Ackerley, “You don’t want anyone saying you’re a Jew? That’s a bad thing?”
“Schneider got into it, but I didn’t want to get into it,” the “Uncut Gems” star recalled.
Of course, multiple versions of the song have come out since the original, and they are mostly accurate. “The Chanukah Song” remains such a big source of joy each Hanukkah, even in the Sandler household. “I sing it every morning. The kids are like, what are you doing, and I’m singing the song again — and I just say, hey, put on your yarmulke, and they’re like ‘alright!'” he joked in that 2022 podcast episode. Then, he shared earnestly: “I’m so proud of that song, I love it, I lucked out.”
We love this song too, and definitely feel lucky that it exists, minor errors and all.
