Today’s New York Times has an editoral discussing Chanukah customs, including dreidel. The author, Howard Jacboson, who won the 2010 Man Booker prize, isn’t a fan. His take is pretty much summed up in this quote: “How many years did I feign excitement when this nothing of a toy was produced? The dreidel would appear and the whole family would fall into some horrible imitation of shtetl simplicity, spinning the dreidel and pretending to care which character was uppermost when it landed. Who did we think we were – the Polish equivalent of the Flintstones?” Similarly, Tablet has a article, “The Unbearable Dumbness of Dreidel.” For our post on the origin and custom of dreidel see here.

Posts discussing Chanukah and related aspects including: the “Bet Yosef’s” question, why there is no tractate devoted to Chanukah, the name Machabee, various Chanukah customs and their origins, this book review on a Chanukah book, and, finally, Eliezer Brodt’s first Seforim blog post discussing Hanukat ha-Bayit a forgotten work regarding Chanukah.

We hope you enjoy these posts and we wish all of our readers a happy Chanukah.