The Penn Libraries have launched a new website, the Gershwind-Bennett Isaac Leeser Digitization Project, featuring access to the personal papers and publications of Isaac Leeser, widely regarded as the foremost American Jewish leader in antebellum America



The Leeser site, developed as an international partnership over the course of seven years, is the first of a number of planned digital initiatives as part of the Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project.  The Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project, founded in 2006, is an international initiative to integrate digital technologies into the way we study early American Jewry.  Its primary goal is to create an open access digital repository or “genizah” of physically dispersed primary sources that document the development of Jewish life in the western hemisphere from the 16th-19th centuries.

This looks to be a wonderful new primary source resource in the history of the Jews in the Western Hemisphere.