Association of Jewish Libraries Publishing
Not a member yet
661 research outputs found
Sort by
Book Review: Jason Lustig, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. ix, 265 p. ISBN: 9780197563526
Full text linkThe Baltimore Hebrew Institute Collection: A Jewish Studies Library Re-imaged
Full text linkThe Baltimore Hebrew University (BHU) was one of a handful of independent Jewish studies institutions in the United States during the twentieth century. Located in the heart of the Baltimore Jewish community, it grew from a small teachers’ college to a doctoral degree-granting university over the course of its many decades. Several factors, including shifting educational trends, pragmatic economic considerations, and societal expectations altered the academic landscape for this institution; dwindling enrollment forced the once-thriving school to consider options for re-location, re-organization, or closure. A little more than ten years ago, BHU’s programs, faculty, and library were incorporated into a large public university located in nearby Towson, Maryland. As part of this move, the extensive resources of the BHU library were integrated with the much larger library of Towson University (TU), and both collections are now housed in one multi-storied building in the middle of a busy urban university campus. This article addresses the phenomenon of merging two disparate library collections and focuses on both the positive and negative results of consolidating academic libraries of different sizes, content, and cultural heritage. The author was a former librarian at BHU and is currently a librarian at TU
The Cultural Doings and Undoings of the Sydney Taylor Book Award
Full text linkThe children’s book award is an ideological vehicle that communicates both implicit and explicit values to the wider world. For half a century, the Sydney Taylor Book Award has invoked criteria of literary excellence and authentic portrayals of Jewish experiences and the implicit cultural values that underpin them in its mission to recognize, celebrate, and perpetuate quality Jewish children’s literature. The award upholds and subverts cultural ideas of childhood, literary excellence, and Jewish authenticity in order to resist systems of power and dominant cultural narratives that seek to erase or flatten Jewish representation
The UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative: Finding the Keys to an Untold History
Full text linkThis essay introduces the scope and aim of the Sephardic Archive Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. In conjunction with the Library, Special Collections, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, this project seeks to locate, collect, archive, and share documents and ephemera relating to Sephardic history. With a focus on their journeys to Los Angeles and Southern California, the initiative aims to tell the stories of Jews from North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. The transnational ties of Sephardic commercial, intellectual, religious, social, and family networks have produced a richly tangled web of history, which for the past century has found a thriving base in Los Angeles. The project seeks to create a hub of scholarly and communal investment, interest, and exploration of materials related to the Sephardic past
Primary Sources in the College Classroom: The Beck Archives at the University of Denver Libraries
Full text linkThe University of Denver’s Libraries’ Special Collections, which include the Beck Archives of Rocky Mountain Jewish History, have made a concerted effort to encourage faculty to incorporate the use of primary sources into their undergraduate curricula. Teaching teams, consisting of special collections curators, reference and instruction librarians, and faculty members, used both digital and physical primary resources to engage students. These efforts led to the DU project’s being named the recipient of the 2018 Primary Source Award for Teaching from the Center of Research Libraries. This article details the project and highlights the Beck Archives items, which were especially effective as teaching materials