A story about a Roman historian who allegedly kept a private journal detailing the first Hanukkah reappears online every December. A non-Jewish eyewitness writing in real time while witnessing the Maccabees light their lamps in Jerusalem sounds alluring. The problem is that no historian who has thoroughly examined the archives is able to identify such…
A serious materials scientist hunched over a kitchen table, flicking a dreidel across the wood grain and timing its spin with a stopwatch, has an almost comical quality. However, according to multiple accounts, that is essentially what happened when a Stanford researcher who studies the mechanics of spinning and rotating bodies began closely examining the…
Menorah sales are not mentioned by any Federal Reserve official in their quarterly forecast. Not formally, anyhow. However, if you walk into a Target store in late November, past the towers of wrapping paper and inflatable snowmen, you’ll discover something that has begun to function almost like an economic mood ring: a whole aisle devoted…
Somewhere in the arid hills of central Iran, between Yazd and Kerman, the old houses are made of mud brick that is the same color as the ground, and the wind brings dust rather than rain. The majority of these communities are not shown on maps intended for tourists. If they appear at all, it’s…
A four-sided plastic top in a suburban New Jersey kitchen essentially settles the question of December. Every year on the first night of Hanukkah, the Feld-Connolly family—she was raised Jewish, he was raised Catholic, and their two children have absorbed some of both—spins a dreidel. One contentious aspect of the holiday season will be decided…
A small group of distillers spends their winters in a converted dairy barn off a county road outside Woodstock, New York, doing something that hardly anyone else in the bourbon industry bothers to try. They construct menorah-shaped barrels. Not menorahs painted on barrels or imprinted on the head in the same manner that Heaven Hill…
This December, a head of state standing next to a rabbi and holding a flame to a candle that is taller than both of them has been a recurring image in news feeds. This year, it took place at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Decades before, it took place outside the White House. The rabbis who initiated…
You might completely miss El Once if you stroll through it on a December evening. No marching band, no enormous menorah on a plaza, nothing designed for a picture. Just a fabric store closing early, a shopkeeper in a kippah locking a metal gate, and candles already lit somewhere behind a buzzer-operated door. That’s the…
On a therapist’s shelf, a four-sided wooden top doesn’t seem like much. However, if you walk into the correct office in December, you’ll find it sitting next to the breathing charts and fidget spinners, performing a task for which it was never intended. The Dreidel was never intended to be a wellness tool. It originates…
There are boxes of paper that were never meant to be sympathetically read in the basement archives of Lisbon’s Torre do Tombo, as well as in comparable rooms in Madrid and Toledo. Most of them are trial records. Confessions and denunciations are the bureaucratic remnants of the Inquisition’s protracted campaign against converted Jews who were…