When something happens to an item, such as a fire, theft, or a clumsy accident during a holiday gathering, their absence creates a wound that no insurance company check can heal. These items are left on a shelf for eleven months out of the year, untouched and sometimes hardly noticed. One of those items is…
In Antwerp, there is a section of Hoveniersstraat where the buildings have an almost aggressively plain appearance. Built in the 1960s, this flat-fronted building has beige and grey facades that might be found in an insurance office park. However, the men in dark suits walking quickly with briefcases chained to their wrists, the groups of…
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…
Being one of the first people on the planet to light a Hanukkah candle every year is subtly amazing. New Zealand’s Jewish community celebrates more than just the Festival of Lights because of the country’s location, which is just west of the International Date Line. They let it open. The menorah flames that flicker to…
Although it has been evident for decades, there is a peculiar imbalance in Hollywood that hardly anyone discusses in public. From Rudolph to The Nightmare, animated holiday entertainment is entirely dominated by Christmas. The other winter holidays hardly make an appearance on the screen, from Christmas to every streaming original that was released in November….
On some nights in late autumn, you can hear the distinct clatter of a wooden top striking a felt-covered table in a back room off Fremont Street. It’s not one of the well-known ones, nor is it the type with velvet ropes or bottle service. For a city built on spectacle and loudness like Las…
In the past, purchasing a menorah required going to a tiny Judaica store on a side street in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side. Most likely, the store owner was aware of your name. The choices were simple: brass, silver-plated, possibly an Israeli handmade item. Although it hasn’t completely vanished, something louder and much more…
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…