The lyricist for the English version of “The Dreidel Song” is Samuel S. Grossman and the composer of the English version is listed as Samuel E. Goldfarb. The Yiddish version was both written and composed by Mikhl Gelbart, but he listed the author as Ben Arn, a pseudonym referring to himself as the son of Aaron. There is a question about who composed this music, as the melody for both the Yiddish and the English versions are precisely the same. The meaning of the lyrics to the Yiddish and English versions is largely the same. However, in English the singer sings about making and playing with a dreidel, whereas in the Kafkaesque original Judeo-German version, the singer is the four-sided spinning top made out of “blay” (lead). Children are encouraged to perform a spinning dance in the Yiddish version, literally playing the part of the dreidel.
An interesting sidenote: the acknowledged composer of the English version of “The Dreidel Song”, Samuel E. Goldfarb, was the music director at Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle from 1930 until 1968. His collected manuscripts were donated by his children in 1984 to the Special Collections Department of the University of Washington Libraries.
“Hava Nagila” (Hebrew: הבה נגילה, Havah Nagilah, “Let us rejoice”) is an Israeli folk song traditionally sung at Jewish celebrations. It is perhaps the first modern Israeli folk song in the Hebrew language that has become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar/bat mitzvah celebrations. The melody is based on a Hassidic tune and it was composed in 1915 in Ottoman Palestine, when Hebrew was being revived as a spoken language for the first time in almost 2,000 years (since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE). For the first time, Jews were being encouraged to speak Hebrew as a common language, instead of Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, or other regional Jewish languages.
