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Blogs Categories: Jewish American History

Blogs Categories: Jewish American History

The Truth Behind the Hanukkah Dreidel: Metafolklore, Play, and Spin

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Hanukkah this year will be celebrated from December 18 to December 26. Jewish children all over the world will be playing a gambling game with a traditional spinning top known as a dreidel. Many of them will also be told stories about the origin and meaning of the dreidel, stories which claim that the dreidel once had a subversive purpose or that it was created to commemorate a great miracle. These stories are themselves interesting folklore. Since the dreidel is a traditional toy used to play a traditional game, such stories about the dreidel and game can be called metafolklore--that is, folklore about folklore. In this blog, we'll take a look at some of these stories about the origin of the dreidel and examine the toy's real history.

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Crime Classics: Ed Lacy's Edgar Award-Winning "Room to Swing"

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This is a guest post by Hannah Freece, a writer-editor in the Library’s Publishing Office. “I broke par in Bingston.” With this enigmatic statement, private eye Toussaint Moore opens “Room to Swing,” Ed Lacy’s Edgar Award–winning 1957 novel, the newest addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics series. It’s the hard-hitting story of a …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Free to Use and Reuse: The Photographs of Bernard Gotfryd

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The photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, now free for anyone to use from the Library's collections, are a remarkable resource of late 20th-century American pop-culture and political life, as he was a Newsweek staff photographer based in New York for three decades. He was also a Holocaust survivor who wrote about the experience with grace and courage.

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Ready for Research: Newsmaker Photos by Bernard Gotfryd

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The following is a guest post by Anne Mitchell, Senior Cataloging Specialist, Prints and Photographs Division. Interested in news-worthy people and events from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s? Get ready to explore the work of photographer Bernard Gotfryd, who donated his work to the Library of Congress. Copyright restrictions ended in 2016. Now available online …