Eight crazy Hannukah clips

‘Tis the season for a new crop of YouTube Hanukkah videos for your soundtrack to this year’s festival of candle lighting and fried-food eating, beginning Tuesday night.

Elliot Dvorin and the Key Tov Orchestra got a big jump on the Hanukkah video race by swinging in back in November with “Hanukkah Song Mashup — Dance Spectacular” and just might make 400k views by first candle lighting.

Now, with only days to spare, others are jumping on the holiday bandwagon.

The Maccabeats, the a cappella group that started the Hanukkah video trend four years ago is back this year with a parody of past summer’s bubblegum pop hit “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor.

Appropriately, the Maccabeats sing about the “neis” (Hebrew for “miracle”) instead of the “bass,” a euphemism for “booty,” or what we Jews affectionately call “tuchus.”

While we’re on the topic of all-male groups, we also give props to Six13 and their “Shake It Off.” After all, who can resist a bunch of guys in colorful tutus? Not many. In the clip’s first three days on YouTube it’s reached almost 300k views.

Shir Soul’s deserves a shout out for its nifty a cappella versions of three Hanukkah classic “O Dreidel,” “Mi Yemalel,” and “Maoz Tzur.” Their video also throws in a little music education, pointing out what is melody, harmony, beat-box, and bass.

If you’re more in to listening to a single crooner than a quartet, then Ari Goldwag’s “Hanukkah Light” might be more your thing. We like his making a Hanukkah menorah out of Perrier bottles in the middle of New York’s Times Square. Of course, the whole thing would have come off a bit edgier had he used beer bottles — Maccabee beer anyone? — instead. Just sayin’.

Always trying to stay current, Jewish outreach organization Aish has Israel-based hip-hop group Shtar singing in its “Lights” video for Hanukkah this year. We have to admit that the rapping is a nice respite from all the harmonizing.

Rapping may be one thing, but where this video from Robot Chicken/Adult Swim takes it might be too far for some — though obviously not for the people who have helped it rack up almost 50,000 views in just a few days. (WARNING: Some may find the following content inappropriate or offensive.)

If engineering is more your thing, check out students at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology shooting for the moon in a Mission Impossible-ische video titled, “Another Hanukkah Miracle from Technion.”

You may recall, two years ago the school produced a video showing a Menorah lighted by a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. And last, year the Technion’s Hanukkah offering had lab coat-wearing students banging out “Maoz Tzur” on chemistry flasks and beakers.

And finally, if you thought that Buzzfeed’s video released around the High Holidays showing young non-Jewish adults eating traditional (Ashkenazi) Jewish foods for the first time was amusing, then you’ll get a kick out of their new Hanukkah video. In it, non-Jews (including some familiar faces from the food clip) try to answer questions about the Jewish holiday that usually falls around Christmas.

One guy clearly still has the subject of the first Buzzfeed video on his mind as he defines “dreidel” as a giant spoon you use to scoop matzo balls out of soup.