The dreidel, which has four Hebrew letters that most Jewish toddlers learn before they completely comprehend their meaning, is little, familiar, wooden, or plastic, depending on the decade you grew up in. Shin, Hei, Gimel, and Nun. Follow the guidelines and spin it to see which letter lands face-up. It seems antiquated. It has a…
A young professional is practicing bouncing a four-sided top off a wooden table and attempting to land it upside down somewhere in a rented event space in Washington, D.C. He has been working on it for the past two weeks. If he prevails, he will receive a personalized trophy and the unofficial title of “Dreidel…
A certain kind of obsession only affects those who are already aware of the complexity of seemingly simple things. That type of person is retired Boston University astrophysicist Kenneth Brecher. Like all children at Hanukkah, he spent his childhood spinning dreidels at his neighborhood synagogue, tossing them on tables, and gambling chocolate coins. The spinning…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…