The Animated Menorah: Travels on a Space Dreidel - Eight Stories for Hannukah (Animated Holydays) [Hardcover]

Rony Oren (Author)

Book Description

Series: Animated Holydays

Two children travel through time and space on a magic dreidel. Their adventures with Judah the Maccabee, George Washington, a Russian refusenik and many others, tell the story of Hannukah.

Full color illustrations created in clay (claymation) by Rony Oren. From the series The Animated Holydays.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 48 pages
• Publisher: Lambda Publishers, Inc. (November 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9657108802
• ISBN-13: 978-9657108802
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,044,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars The kids love it, December 12, 2009

By 

Adam Solomon (Brookline, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Animated Menorah: Travels on a Space Dreidel - Eight Stories for Hannukah (Animated Holydays) (Hardcover)

This book has eight stories that you can read during the course of the holiday. My four and eight year old kids love it. In it Danny and his older sister Judy travel on a magic space dreidel into different periods of Jewish history. Each chapter is two or three pages long and only takes a few minutes to read. It lends itself to being a nice pre-bedtime activity.

As an adult there are aspects of the book I don't like, but that doesn't really matter since I'm not the target audience.

Having said that, I wish that the stories were written from the point of view of both the boy and the girl, rather than having the boy be the protagonist/narrator. The book is somewhat dated since it ends with the Soviet refuseniks as a contemporary situation. Since the whole book has been a trip through Jewish history, this isn't a fatal flaw as Soviet/Russian antisemitism was an important phenomenon.