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The Importance of Being Discovered: The Werner Von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection
Full text linkThe Werner von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection, housed in Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library, is a series of photographs of 1930s–1940s Shanghai taken by Werner von Boltenstern. The images capture a time and place at a crossroads of culture and history. World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War were raging and the city, a trade center populated by numerous peoples, including Chinese citizens, British, French, and American nationals, Sephardic and Russian Jews, and the occupying Japanese military, was receiving an influx of European Jews fleeing Nazi Europe. The rediscovery of this collection (it sat unused for many years) led to its digitization, a successful crowdsourcing effort to gather more metadata, and the incorporation of the collection into an LMU Literature of the Holocaust class digital project. Through these endeavors, the library has increased its understanding of the collection’s historical value, in particular as it relates to Holocaust studies and Jewish studies more broadly
The Victor Perera Papers: The Archive of a Twentieth Century Sephardic-American Writer
Full text linkThe author shares the circumstances that led to his encounter with the personal archives of Victor Haim Perera (1934–2003), an award-winning Sephardic-American writer, journalist, environmental and political activist, and academic born in Guatemala City. Perera published six books on topics as varied as Sephardic history, the Maya Indians, and the Loch Ness monster, and contributed dozens of articles, short stories, and essays to newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and literary anthologies. This paper also provides an overview of Perera’s life and work and shares information about the Victor Perera Papers collection at the University of Michigan Library. It presents a case study illustrating that library catalogers can improve discoverability of and access to library special collections by expanding beyond their core duties and investigating the contexts behind the materials that cross their desks. The article ends with a preliminary bibliography of Perera’s works
The Sydney Taylor Book Award at Fifty: Trends in Canonized Jewish Children’s Literature (1968–2020)
Full text linkThe Sydney Taylor Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries since 1968, is the only book award for children’s literature that represents the Jewish experience. The award’s fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 2018, provided an opportunity to conduct a content analysis study of 102 books and summarize thematic and publishing trends across award categories and time periods. The data points collected were based on bibliographic records and, to smaller extent, on coded Holocaust-related themes. Conclusions refer to Jewish education in the United States and concepts of gender, identity, history, and Holocaust studies that have shaped it through children’s literature for over fifty years
Tribute to Zachary Baker, Editor of Judaica Librarianship (2005-2012), on the Occasion of His Retirement
Full text linkMintz, Sharon Liberman, Shaul Seidler-Feller, David Wachtel, eds. The Writing on the Wall: A Catalogue of Judaica Broadsides from the Valmadonna Trust Library. London; New York: Valmadonna Trust Library, 2015. 320 p., $75.00. ISBN: 9780692453032
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Dangerous Liaisons in Cairo: Reginald Q. Henriques and the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Manuscript Collection
Full text linkWhen Solomon Schechter published his opus magnum, the co-edited volume of The Wisdom of Ben Sira, in 1899, he took the trouble to express his gratitude towards one Reginald Q. Henriques for his help in the past and still ongoing. This article attempts to answer the question: who was this Mr. Henriques and what was the nature of his connection to Schechter? Using previously unpublished archival evidence, this question is explored in depth, as well as the question of why Schechter chose to acknowledge this individual precisely at that point. It also provides an in-depth account, together with transcriptions of original letters, of the activities of the various genizah manuscript collectors operating in Cairo during the late 1890s and the unspoken race to recover the original Hebrew version of the Book of Ben Sira. These activities are viewed against the backdrop of an all-pervasive scholarly culture that was critical of post-biblical Judaism, as well as prevailing Cairene attitudes and behaviors towards those engaged in the recovery and export of antiquities, and the varying (often arbitrary) authorizations and restrictions exercised by Cairo's European and Egyptian administrators. Finally, it takes a closer look at the contents of today's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library in an attempt to discover greater details about its exact provenance
A Jewish National Collection for a Jewish National Library: The Abraham Schwadron Collection, Past and Present
Full text linkThe fascinating story of the creation and development of this unique collection is matched only by the collection's importance as a resource of primary material for research in the social sciences, the humanities, and even the exact sciences. With over five and a half thousand leading Jewish personalities represented in their original handwriting, Abraham Schwadron's autograph collection is more than just the first Jewish Who's Who. The inscribed visiting cards, literary manuscripts, handwritten letters, and even musical scores are all evidence of a Jewish social milieu and cultural enterprise that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present day. The collection is a written record of the history of the Jewish people as it unfolded. No less dramatic is the man behind the collection, who from his youth in Galicia decided he would build a national Jewish autograph collection for the Jewish people and bring it to Jerusalem. The National Library of Israel is presently working to make this whole collection accessible to the public, first by rendering the collection searchable through the Library's online catalogue and then by digitizing the entire collection of autographs.
This article traces the history of the collection, introduces the intriguing figure of Abraham Schwadron and his rationale for building the collection, and reveals the many ways that the collection's rich and fascinating potential can be used as a resource of original source material. At the end of the article there is brief reference to the National Library of Israel's project for digitizing the collection