Former Scroll maestro Marc Tracy brings our attention to the latest in a yearly Hanukkah tradition—seriously—of the Houston Rockets singing “The Dreidel Song.”
The best part of this year’s video, which is otherwise pretty lackluster (sorry boys), is Israeli player Omri Casspi, who signed with the Rockets this summer—and who faced off against Gal Mekel, the NBA’s second Israeli player, when the Rockets played the Dallas Mavericks last month—as he tries to sing along.
He’s a good sport, even though the Israeli-born small forward has clearly never encountered the distinctly American Hanukkah song before (there’s a Yiddish version, too: “Ikh Bin A Kleyner Dreydl”). Hopefully he’ll have better luck with the song selection when he attends the White House menorah lighting next week.
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Omri Casspi to Sign With the Houston Rockets
Stephanie Butnick is the founder of GOLDA, a Jewish lifestyle newsletter. She hosted the Tablet podcast Unorthodox, co-authored The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia: From Abraham to Zabar’s and Everything in Between, and worked as a writer and editor at Tablet.
