‘Oy to the World’ celebrates Jewish culture through Hanukkah songs, stories and trivia

LAUREN GILGER: Local creative Rebecca Weinstein loves theater. The stage manager and performer has worked dozens of shows. She even met her husband, Josh, at a local production of “Cats.”

SAM DINGMAN: So last winter, while watching Josh perform in a production of “Scrooge,” she was struck with an idea.

REBECCA WEINSTEIN: I was listening to him play and I was thinking man, between the two of us we have done so many Christmas shows in our careers. I have stage managed “The Nutcracker” countless times, “A Christmas Carol,” I’ve performed in “A Christmas Carol.” He’s done so many. …

I was like, man, there are no Hanukkah shows in the Valley for all of the tribe here in Arizona. There really should be a Hanukkah show.

GILGER: Not long after noticing this gap in holiday fare, Weinstein heard the artistic director of the Bridge Initiative was looking for something for the local theater company’s 2025 December calendar.

WEINSTEIN: I felt like it was meant to be. I was like ... the stars are aligning. They have an opening in December. I turned to my husband after the show and I said, "I think we could make something funny and relatable, and we don’t have to write a whole story. It could be a Hanukkah cabaret."

And he kind of looked at me like I had two heads, and so the two of us sat down. We talked about all the things we think our funny about Hanukkah and Christmas time. The fact that most Christmas songs are written by Jewish people, the fact that most Jewish people, there are parts of Christmas that we love. A lot of us listen to Christmas music or like to decorate our houses or some folks have a Hanukkah bush and what’s funny about that? What’s quirky about that?

And then we scoured the internet for obscure Hanukkah songs, and we dug deep and we listened to a lot of them. And some were terrible, but there were a lot that were really funny and sweet and quirky. And so we started there, and we picked songs we would want to listen to that we would want to hear people sing and groove to and then we sort of wrote bits all around that.

GILGER: The resulting show co-created by the Weinsteins is “Oy to the World,” a cabaret-style revue celebrating Jewish culture through Hanukkah songs, stories and trivia.

DINGMAN: Ok, so most of us are familiar with “I Have a Little Dreidel,” but we had to ask: Are there really enough Hanukkah songs to fill a whole show?

WEINSTEIN: Yeah, so we had a joke that our main criteria was songs that weren’t written by a cantor in 1887. There’s really a quite diverse mix of songs.

We've got the Barenaked Ladies “Hanukkah Blessings” song, which has always been a favorite of mine. We’ve got a section all about Broadway, and so we do a little bit from of course [“Fiddler on the Roof”], but then we do the famous "Spamalot" song you can’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews — a classic.

And then we do a medley of holiday songs that is part of a little game show. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s quite the mix. And of course we had to throw Sandler in there, and we did write to Adam Sandler. He didn’t write back but he did send a postcard.

GILGER: You can catch the 90-minute show at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 1 — one night only — at the ASU Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale. Rebecca suggests donning your very best ugly Hanukkah sweater.