No auction house has come forward to confirm a menorah selling for exactly $2 million in London. But it’s worth sitting with the question of what it would mean if one did, because the gap between that number and reality is smaller than most people assume. Consider the trajectory. In 2016, a 270-year-old menorah tied…
Seeing a hedge fund manager talk about spinning tops with the same seriousness he saves for municipal bonds is almost humorous. However, this is increasingly the case at some auction previews, where a hand-carved wooden dreidel from a Polish shtetl or a 19th-century silver dreidel from Galicia attracts the same level of attention as rare…
There isn’t much competition for the fluorescent lights in the third-floor ward at Columbia Presbyterian. However, on the sixth night of Hanukkah, a string of battery-powered candles was hung along the nurses’ station, and for a brief moment, the hallway appeared almost festive—a description that is rarely associated with a hospital hallway. The party takes…
For many years, Hanukkah has primarily depicted a Hallmark deli owner falling in love with a rival deli owner over a plate of latkes. Although the formula is comfortable and effective, it is somewhat thin. Therefore, it felt more like a statement than a programming quirk when a French film festival recently debuted its first…
This year, there’s a minor but significant change taking place on Hanukkah tables that has nothing to do with the latkes or candles. It’s the dreidel itself. For many years, the spinning top that serves as the focal point of the most well-known game for the holiday came almost entirely from a factory mold; it…
In December, you might notice something strange sitting next to the pegboards and putty in a pediatric occupational therapy clinic. A dreidel. As equipment, not as ornamentation. It seems almost too easy to do. A four-sided spinning top, similar to those distributed at Hanukkah celebrations, was requested to serve as rehabilitation equipment, which typically costs…
Outside of Yountville, there’s a section of road where the vineyards darken by five o’clock in January, just past the final tasting room before the hills begin to rise. In Napa Valley, this month is the quietest. The majority of the summer visitors to the valley have left, the crush is long gone, and the…
A group of soldiers crouch around a wooden crate that serves as a table on a chilly night somewhere close to the northern border. There is no official schedule and no officer making decisions. A small spinning top with only four sides, a stack of chocolate coins that someone’s mother mailed weeks ago, and an…
A different kind of competition takes over a few Wall Street trading floors every December, somewhere between the Santa hats and the year-end bonus rumors. There is no sponsor for it. No HR calendar displays it. Once it begins, very little else on the desk gets done because it’s a dreidel tournament that is almost…
There is a particular kind of video that shows up every December: a phone propped against a kitchen window, a menorah catching the last light of dusk, someone narrating the blessing in a half-whisper before the candles take. It looks small. It is not small anymore. Hanukkah, a holiday Jewish tradition has always ranked well…