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…
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…