Guest post: Noa Tsaushu on Issachar Ryback’s Shtetl, mayn khorever heym: a gedekhenish

Opening page of the book, with the main text in an oval flanked by two creatures on either side.

Noa Tsaushu is a doctoral student of Yiddish Studies at Columbia University, currently working to complete her dissertation titled “Yiddish Art: The Desire for Cohesion among the Soviet-Yiddish Avant-Garde.” She is this year’s recipient of the Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music, and Theater at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and […]

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American Jewish Historical Newspapers – available and online!

One of the most important primary source resources for modern Jewish history is the Jewish Historical Press (JHP) project, hosted by the National Library of Israel.  The goal of the project is to digitize and make available Jewish newspapers from around the globe.  At present, this freely accessible database provides access to 775 titles from […]

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From the Stacks…Exploring the Sephardic World in Amsterdam

This essay was initially printed in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies’ 2022 Magazine. The full magazine is available here. The Sephardic Jews and their descendants were very proud of their cultural heritage.  Wherever they traveled, they brought their culture – and languages – with them to their new homelands. Spanish and Portuguese persisted […]

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Alexander Library Celebration of Collections 2023

We are thrilled to announce the annual Alexander Library Celebration of Collections for 2023, which will take place virtually on November 9, 2023 at 12 PM EST. This year’s event will feature the following speakers and topics, and focusing on rare books and manuscripts from Spain, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, spanning the 14th through […]

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“Just digitize it!?” A peek into the labor and workflows of the Judaica digitization project

At Columbia University Libraries, and at the Norman E. Alexander Library in particular, one of our major goals is to provide access to materials to as broad a user base as possible. With one of the largest Judaica manuscript collections in the United States, a major priority has been to provide access to these unique […]

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Hanukkah in the RBML

Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds a diverse collection of Judaica, and its holdings relating to the holiday of Hanukkah span various collections, including rare books and manuscripts, graphic arts, and literature. This post will attempt to show some of the varied items from our collections dealing with the holiday, through legal and rabbinic […]

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N. E. Alexander Library’s Celebration of Collections 2022!

Poster for the Alexander Lecture, to be held on Novmeber 14, 2022.

We are very pleased to announce the 2022 Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections on November 14, at 12:30 PM EST, featuring Charles E. Steinman, Dr. Susan Einbinder, and Dan Klein. Collections discussed include a medieval French manuscript that echoes the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, a 17th century manuscript discussing the plague in […]

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Life, Love, Loss, and the Shaking of the Earth in Livorno

Books tell stories. Not only through the texts written or printed within them, but also through the ephemera and paratexts – the bindings, the inscriptions, even wax seals casually stamped in the back of a volume. Such is the case with a volume in Columbia’s collection, cataloged with the call number B893.14 Y11.  There are […]

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