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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Certain types of objects wind up weighing more than they should. A small wooden toy that spins on a table, a picture, a chipped mug. It took years for a woman who was adopted as a baby into a Dutch Protestant home in New York to realize why her parents had given her a dreidel…
Over candlelight and fried dough, a certain kind of small talk takes place that sounds nothing like diplomacy. However, if you walk into nearly any embassy reception during Hanukkah season, whether in Washington, Vienna, Doha, or Ottawa, you’ll notice something that formal summits seldom capture: officials from unrelated nations standing shoulder to shoulder, holding tiny…
Modern life is more connected than ever,at least on the surface. People message instantly, join virtual communities, and share life updates across social platforms in seconds. Yet despite all this digital connection, many people feel lonelier, busier, and more emotionally disconnected than before. This is exactly why traditions like Hanukkah matter. At first glance, Hanukkah…