Everyone with an agenda seems to turn Chanukah into the holiday of their message. When the Gemara (Shabbos 21b) asks “What is Chanukah?,” it did not answer with contemporary ideologies. In a somewhat humorous, while at the same time scary, way, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik describes his personal confrontation with this phenomenon during his college years. This passage is from the fantastic Days of Deliverance: Essays on Purim and Hanukkah (pp. 125-136):

Hanukkah, on the other hand, is a holiday that has good luck. Everyone celebrates it; everyone is glad to associate themselves with the Maccabees and the Hasmoneans–be they half-Jews, whole Jews, assimilated Jews, atheists, agnostics, and even those who are Jew-haters, all are spiritually enriched by the holiday.

I remember that in the late 1920s I happened to pass the Sunday Temple on Johannes Street in Berlin to which the assimilated Jews of Germany belonged, Jews who genuinely despised the Jewish people. (Many of them were members of the League of National German Jews [Verband nationaldeutscher Juden], the so-called Naumann group, an organization dedicated to German patriotism and Jewish assimilation.) I noticed that the temple was richly illuminated and decorated for a holiday. I was curious, so I went into the temple, where I found them having a Hanukkah celebration. The rabbi lit the menorah, all eight candles–as I remember, it was the third night of Hanukkah–and then gave a clever speech. The highpoint of the sermon was that the true heirs of the Hasmoneans, of Matityahu and his sons, were actually the National German Jews, who were at that time conducting a campaign to expel from Germany the Ost-Juden–the Jews from the East, generally Poland.

That same Hanukkah, I happened upon nother curiosity. In the Jewish community library on Oranienburger Street, I chanced upon a copy of the Moscow newspaper Der Emes (Truth), the newspaper of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish department of the notorious Soviet NKVD. This newspaper also had an article on Hanukkah and the Hasmoneans. With every means at its disposal, the article argued that Hanukkah was actually a Communist holiday, and the Jewish bourgeoisie and the clerical world had no right to celebrate Hanukkah. Judah the Maccabee was the first Yevsektsiya member.