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Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I printed you 3D

The 3D-printing craze has even hit dreidels? It's enough to make your head spin.

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Leslie_Katz.jpg
Leslie Katz Former Culture Editor
Leslie Katz led a team that explored the intersection of tech and culture, plus all manner of awe-inspiring science, from space to AI and archaeology. When she's not smithing words, she's probably playing online word games, tending to her garden or referring to herself in the third person.
Credentials
  • Third place film critic, 2021 LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards
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Leslie Katz
2 min read

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Jared Leavitt and the menorah he 3D-printed. This being an event for techies, the menorah made an appearance on social media, with a hashtag, #sharethelights. Tech Tribe

Happy 3D-printed holidays. We've already covered 3D-printed Christmas ornaments this year, and now we bring you a Hanukkah party featuring both a 3D-printed menorah and 3D-printed dreidels.

At a Brooklyn celebration for Tech Tribe, a group for Jews in tech and social media, participants last week kindled a menorah printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D printer. Elliot Glassman and Benjamin Gross designed the very modern candelabrum, and it took more than 30 hours to print it out of gray filament. More time went to shaving it down to perfection with an X-Acto knife.

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Now that's a geeky dreidel (not surprisingly, created by MIT students). MIT Hillel

Before the event, Tech Tribe also put out a call for submissions to a 3D-printed dreidel design competition. Not surprisingly, an engineer who works at Makerbot, Noah Greenbaum, scored the winning design with a giant illuminated spinning top printed on a Makerbot Replicator Z18 and seen twirling in the Vine below. It's not the first 3D-printed dreidel we've seen -- an MIT student group also held a competition this year, with some fantastically geeky results -- and with 3D printing hitting everything from medicine to music to architecture, we're fairly sure we'll be seeing more of these tech-ified Hanukkah toys in the future.

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Tech Tribe was started by Mordechai Lightstone, a Brooklyn Orthodox rabbi affiliated with Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism that has embraced technology as a way to bridge the ancient and the modern. Last year, Chabad employed a robot for a San Francisco Hanukkah candlelighting ceremony and also held a "Chanukah in 3D" event in Silicon Valley featuring 3D-printing stations churning out dozens of plastic dreidels.