In a ballroom drenched in tinsel and Christmas carols, “Dancing With the Stars” did something genuinely new this year: it made space for a Hanukkah miracle.
Midway through the franchise’s first-ever holiday special, which was released on Dec. 2 on Disney+ and Hulu, Jewish pro Alan Bersten, 31, stepped onto the floor to introduce a Hanukkah routine set to Matisyahu’s “Miracle.”
This wasn’t just another themed week in a long season — it was the show’s first dedicated holiday special, “Dancing With the Holidays,” after years of Christmas-heavy winter numbers. In all that time, “DWTS” had never given Hanukkah its own spotlight. For Bersten, the Minnesotan son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who’s been part of the show for years, finally getting to choreograph and perform a Hanukkah dance felt like a genuine first.
Flanked by fellow Jewish pro Val Chmerkovskiy and non-Jewish co-stars Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater, Onye Stevenson, and Hailey Bills, Bersten brought the Festival of Lights to the ballroom.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he told the dancers in rehearsal. “We need a miracle.”
Before the number, Bersten shared that, growing up as a Jewish kid glued to the TV during the holiday season, he rarely saw his traditions reflected back at him.
Alan Bersten celebrating Hanukkah as a kid (Disney)
“Everyone celebrates holidays in a different way. Growing up Jewish, you don’t really see a lot of Hanukkah representation, so tonight we’re doing a special performance to celebrate Hanukkah,” he said.
“Hopefully a Jewish kid’s watching this, and they feel seen, and they feel proud,” he continued.
Alan Bersten’s Hanukkah dance shared the spirit of the holiday
Read more: From Dylan Efron to Val Chmerkovskiy: Meet the Jewish cast of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ Season 34
Instead of a gimmicky Hanukkah segment, the number feels like a full-on “DWTS” showstopper: tight unison sections, big traveling runs across the floor, and bursts of partner work that build with the music, turning the chorus into a kind of joyful, spinning celebration.
Set to “Miracle,” a modern Hanukkah anthem written to give Jewish kids something to hold onto in a sea of Christmas music, the routine leans into the holiday’s core ideas of resilience and unexpected light. As the dancers linked arms in a hora circle or shot their arms up like candles, it wasn’t just cute choreography, but a visualization of the underdog story of resilience and community at the center of Hanukkah.
Hailey Bills, Valentin Chmerkovskiy, Onye Stevenson, Emma Slater, and Gleb Savchenko (Disney/Eric McCandless)
Bersten layered the routine with nods to classic Jewish imagery. Formations that mimic a menorah, spins and jumps that echo dreidels, and moments that draw directly from traditional Jewish folk dancing. Many of the moves feel like they were lifted from Eastern European shtetls — very “Fiddler on the Roof,” but with sequins, spotlights, and blue and silver confetti cannons.
While practicing the hora with his fellow dancers, Chmerkovskiy explained that the traditional circle dance “symbolizes celebrating one another.” On a show built around competition and elimination, that idea — literally lifting each other up — landed differently in the context of a Hanukkah number.
How fans responded to seeing Hanukkah in the ballroom
For casual viewers, the Hanukkah routine might have just been a fun detour in a very sparkly hour of TV. But for a lot of Jewish fans, it clearly hit deeper.
“We never get holiday representation like this and it means so much!” one fan wrote.
“Made me teary to get to show my kids this,” another said.
Valentin Chmerkovskiy and Onye Stevenson, Hailey Bills and Alan Bersten, Gleb Savchenko and Emma Slater (Disney/Eric McCandless)
One fan labeled the dance “a beautiful representation of Jewish joy.”
“Thank you so much for having a dance that features Chanukah! It’s rare for our holiday to be remembered, acknowledged, even when members of the faith are connected to it. It was a beautiful dance, and a great song by Matisyahu! Now more than ever, with all of the antisemitism, this means so much!” another added.
The overwhelmingly positive response stood out even more because not everyone loved the holiday special overall. Some fans complained on social media that it felt too short or too focused on filler bits. Yet across recaps and fan posts, Bersten’s segment kept popping up as one of the standout moments of the night, precisely because it offered something viewers had never seen before on “DWTS”: an unapologetically Jewish holiday number, treated with the same production value and care as any big Christmas routine.
For Jewish kids watching at home — especially in a year when being visibly Jewish can feel complicated or even risky — seeing a crowd of dancers celebrate Hanukkah with joy, on one of the biggest stages on television, was its own kind of miracle.
Who are the Jews of “Dancing with the Stars”
The ballroom dancing world is dominated by Russian and Ukrainian Jews and their descendants, but this long history is not discussed on “Dancing With the Stars.”
For casual viewers, pros like Alan Bersten and Val Chmerkovskiy are just the guys with the impossible-to-spell last names and fantastic paso dobles. But if you look a little closer, the “DWTS” ballroom is basically a mini–Soviet Jewish immigration story in sequins. So many of the show’s most iconic pros either grew up in the former Soviet Union or are the children of immigrants from there — including dancers from Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Moldovan Jewish families who brought their love of ballroom with them when they moved to the U.S.
Over the years, that’s included names like Ukrainian-born Karina Smirnoff, whose family has Russian Jewish roots, and Ukrainian-born Alec Mazo. The Chmerkovskiy brothers, Maks and Val, grew up in a Jewish-Russian household in Odessa before immigrating to Brooklyn. Bersten’s story fits right into that lineage: his Russian-Jewish parents opened a ballroom studio in Minnesota, so their kids could dance, launching him on the path that eventually led to the “DWTS” stage. Daniella Karagach, another current pro, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents from Moldova and grew up in that same Russian-speaking immigrant dance world.
Season 34, which wrapped just before the holiday special, made that Jewish presence even more visible — at least on paper. On the pro side, you had Alan, Val, and Daniella all competing for the mirrorball this year. Former Jewish pro Sasha Farber, whose family immigrated from what is now Belarus to Australia, made appearances throughout the season.
ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” stars Dylan Efron (Disney/Andrew Eccles)
ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” stars Corey Feldman. (Disney/Andrew Eccles)
On the celebrity side, there were multiple contestants with Jewish roots, including Dylan Efron (who danced with Daniella) and Corey Feldman (paired with Jenna Johnson).
What’s unusual about Bersten’s Hanukkah number is that, for once, the show didn’t just quietly benefit from that history — it actually said it out loud. Instead of leaving their Jewishness as a fun fact for interviews or fan deep-dives, the special let Alan, Val, and the rest of the cast bring that identity into the choreography itself, making the Jewish roots of the ballroom part of the story, not just the backstory.
