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Notes -
Re: Kwanzaa, I finally met someone who celebrates it instead of Christmas last year. Otherwise, my only exposure was Nickelodeon ads for the Rugrats Kwanzaa special (which I somehow never managed to catch), and TFS throwing in a mention into one of their holiday videos.
Speaking of Rugrats, that's also the majority of my education on Hanukkah. Never did get the origin of the potato pancakes thing, since potatos are not a crop I'd generally associate with Iron Age Israel. Something to do with a prohibition on leavened bread?
But the Rugrats Hanukkah special did make Hanukkah out to be a bigger deal than Passover, which in hindsight is kinda clearly coming from the present, given that the Passover special focused primarily on the Exodus story, while the Hanukkah special spent more time on the characters, while the backstory got like two short scenes. (But Grandpa Boris's narration on the finale was oddly intense and sincere for a NickToon, IIRC.)
Oh, and in college one year, a Jewish student taught his friend group how to play Dreidel, and we also watched the original Godzilla Vs Mothra, so that was fun I guess.
That's because potato pancakes are not an Iron Age Israel thing. The only significance to potato pancakes is that they're fried in copious amounts of oil. Jews are basically willing to eat anything fried for Hanukah in order to celebrate, because the Hanukah miracle was that supposedly the oil necessary for keeping the lamps lit to purify their temple lasted for 8 days when there was only enough for one day. Potato pancakes came out of eastern European traditions, from countries like Poland and Germany where potato pancakes were already consumed as a local food, and the local Jews there adopted it as their Hanukah tradition. But Jews elsewhere eat donuts, fritters of all types, fried cheese cakes, fried pumpkin cakes etc. Indian Jews even eat gulab jamun to celebrate.
The prohibition on leavened bread is an entirely separate holiday, Passover (which as OP notes is actually a much more important holiday to Jews than Hanukah). Leavened bread is fine for Jews to eat at Hanukah.
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