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Category: Jewish American History

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The House I Live In: Philip Roth’s America

Posted by: Anne Holmes

For Jewish American Heritage Month, Manuscript Division curator Barbara Bair explores Philip Roth’s novel "The Plot Against America" (and its recent television adaptation). Set between 1940 and 1942, when Roth himself was a child, the novel examines the status of being Jewish and being American in a particularly perilous time period in American and world history.

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Sholem Aleichem, The Yiddish Mark Twain

Posted by: Peter Armenti

For Jewish American Heritage Month, a guest post by research specialist Susan Garfinkel explores the legacy of author Sholem Aleichem, sometimes called "the Yiddish Mark Twain," whose stories of Tevye the dairyman inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Drawing on items from the Library's collections, including newspapers, playscripts, poems, and recordings, she looks at Aleichem's time in America, and delves into the question of whether the two famous humorists ever met.

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Happy Hanukkah from the Poetry and Literature Center

Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo

This past Sunday marked the first night of Hanukkah, and Washington, D.C. celebrated in true style with the lighting of the world’s largest menorah on the Ellipse, just across from the White House. Here at the Poetry and Literature Center the decorations are a little more austere (a blue and white snowflake left over from …