While the melody is nearly ubiquitous among American Jews, it is by no means ancient, as Albert Stern explains:

Samuel E. Goldfarb penned “I Have a Little Dreidel” (with Samuel S. Grossman) [in the 1920s], while his older brother, Israel Goldfarb, composed [a widely used melody for the Sabbath hymn] “Shalom Aleichem.”. . .

The Goldfarb brothers grew up on the Lower East Side of New York in a family of eleven children that emigrated from Galicia. Samuel was born in 1891, and learned how to read and play music from his brother Israel, who was twelve years his senior. In 1914, Samuel—who was making music in Yiddish theaters and other popular venues—entered into an arranged marriage with Bella Horowitz, from the family that owned Horowitz-Margareten, renowned makers of matzah and Passover products. . . .

While Samuel started out playing piano in theaters, Israel—a graduate of the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School), the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University—rose to fame as a noted cantor, and later became the long-serving rabbi at the venerable Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn. . . .

“Generally speaking, in America Yiddish music influenced the popular music of Broadway and Hollywood,” said [Samuel Goldfarb’s son, Myron Gordon]. “With these kinds of songs, it was the opposite—it was an American tone being brought into a Jewish context.”

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.