The Unbearable Lightness of Stupidity
So Howard Jacobson at the New York Times has weighed in with this year’s compulsory whining about how lame Hanukkah is. The “new” twist is complaining about dreidel—and the fact that “Hasmonean” is a funny word.
Those Hasmoneans, for example …. The Maccabees are fair enough: they sound Jewish. Scottish Jewish but still Jewish. There was a sports and social club called the Maccabi round the corner from where I was brought up in North Manchester, and as a boy I imagined the Maccabees as stocky, short-legged, hairy men like the all-conquering Maccabi table tennis team. But “Hasmoneans” rang and rings no bells.
Then, to see this lameness and raise it one more unit of vapidity (there’s gotta be a scientific measure of vapidity), Marc Tracy at Tablet rags on the dreidel game
Oh, and raise your hand if you’ve ever actually made your dreidel out of clay? I thought so.
and uses the Jacobson piece as his prooftext.
Lets hear it for Jewish though and opinion (and the newspaper of record).
(Hat tip to the Seforim Blog, which had a niece piece about dreidel with, you know, history, facts and stuff… I know–boring.)