I am please to announce the acquisition of the premier online Hebrew Dictionary, Rav Milim, now available to the Columbia community. This comprehensive dictionary “includes all strata of the Hebrew language, from the Biblical to current Israeli slang. It also includes linguistic tools that can find and retrieve any of Hebrew’s 70 million inflected forms, […]
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“Researchathon” on Jewish book provenance, November 14
We are pleased to announce that there will be a Researchathon at the Studio@Butler focusing on the movement of printed Judaica throughout the centuries. “This researchathon is part of a series for the Center for Jewish History’s Working Group on the Jewish Book. The coordinators will update the group on the progress of our Hebrew […]
New Electronic Resources: Hebrew-language journals and dictionaries
I am very pleased to announce that we have recently purchased some very important electronic collections for Jewish Studies research at Columbia. Two collections of journal archives, including many Hebrew journals in the fields of art, Bible, history, folklore, philosophy, and many other topics, are now available through JSTOR via the Jewish Studies Collection and […]
New Acquisitions: All this has come upon us…
We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of a haunting and beautiful portfolio of exhibition prints entitled All this has come upon us…, created by Dr. Mark Podwal. This series of images was created for an exhibition at the Terezin Ghetto Museum from April to July 2014. The series includes images relating to […]
Adventures in the Rare Book Stacks
Hannah Vaitsblit, a Barnard freshman, has been doing cataloging work with the rare printed Judaica collection for the past few months. Only about 1/3 of our rare printed Judaica are accessible in CLIO, but now, thanks largely to Hannah’s painstaking work, many more books have been (and continue to be) added to our online catalog. […]
New Acquisitions: Travels of Moise Vita Cafsuto
In 1733, a man from Firenze, in Italy, named Moise (Moses) Vita (Hayyim) Cafsuto (Cassuto) set off on a journey to the Holy Land. He kept a diary of his travels throughout the Middle East, where he noted interesting sites (specifically Jewish ones, like graves and synagogues) and scenes along his journey. We recently acquired […]
Printers’ Marks in Handwritten Books
From almost the dawn of printing, printers have created special insignia to indicate their handiwork on the books that they produced. Jewish printers marks varied in design from the very simple (like the lion of Eliezer Alantansi in Hijar in the late 15th century, left), to the very complex (see below). The major source for […]
New Resource: Sefaria
Sefaria is a new, crowdsourced website which is "building a free living library of Jewish texts and their interconnections, in Hebrew and in translation. [The] scope is Torah in the broadest sense, from Tanakh to Talmud to Zohar to modern texts and all the volumes of commentary in between." Thus far, over 200,000 words have […]
Norman E. Alexander Lecture: How (and why) the Jews Invented Hollywood
Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the annual Norman E. Alexander Lecture in Jewish Studies, featuring Neal Gabler, Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC: "How (and why) the Jews invented Hollywood." The lecture will take place on Wednesday, October 16 at the Skylight Room in the Faculty House (64 Morningside Drive, […]
New acquisitions: Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online
"The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the history and study of the Hebrew language from its earliest attested form to the present day. The encyclopedia contains overview articles that provide a readable synopsis of current knowledge of the major periods and varieties of the […]