A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, 1910 – 1965

Long Island University is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “A Fine Romance.  Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, 1910 – 1965 on Thursday, March 8 from 5:30p – 8:00p in the Hutchins Gallery of the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library on the LIU/Post campus.  This traveling exhibit is further enriched with a display of original movie […]

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Hebrew mss @ CUL: The Whole Megillah

In honor of the upcoming holiday of Purim (March 8), here is a Megilat Esther from Columbia's Smith Collection.  Professor David Eugene Smith, a professor at Columbia's Teacher's College from 1901-1926, was a scholar in the History of Mathematics who went around the world collecting manuscripts and rare books related to his topic.  He spent […]

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More Yiddish…Haynt digitized and online

I wrote last year about the incredible resource that is the Historical Jewish Press.  In a further effort to make Jewish newspapers available freely online, the HJP has now digitized its first Yiddish paper,Haynt.  Haynt was a seminal Jewish newspaper in Eastern Europe from 1908-1939, and is a critical resource for day to day news […]

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Hebrew mss @ CUL: Unpublished Plays from the Yiddish Theatre

Columbia’s Yiddish Studies Program is the oldest in the country, beginning in 1952 under the direction of renowned Yiddish scholar Uriel Weinreich.  Weinreich’s student, Marvin Herzog was one of the major figures in the creation of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), whose archives are held at Columbia. In terms of historic […]

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Lecture @ CUL: J.P. Morgan, German-Jewish Bankers, and the Crisis of the First World War

All sessions take place in 523 Butler Library, 6:30– 8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted.   February 28, 2012 (Tuesday) Susie J. Pak Assistant Professor of History St. John’s University J.P. Morgan, German-Jewish Bankers, and the Crisis of the First World War Pak will present a history of how the First World War created a crisis […]

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Harvard’s Judaica Library Publications – available freely online!

Libraries tend to be dedicated to open access, devoted to making their collections available to anyone in need of research.  With a recent announcement from a Harvard Judaica Librarian, we see that Harvard is definitely on board with this.  The Judaica publications that they have digitized include work on Yiddish language and literature, Israel Studies, […]

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Hebrew mss @ CUL: Jews and Privileges in Germany

The Hebrew manuscript collection at CUL is quite wide-ranging, covering space from India to the Carribean, and time from the 10th to the 20th centuries.  It has particularly strong coverage of the early modern period, with substantial historical materials from Italy and Amsterdam, Greece (Corfu) and France.   One obvious lacuna for our collection was the […]

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Online Resources: Finding Archives

It is true that the business of doing history in today’s internet age has become much easier, but there are still a tremendous amount of resources that are only available physically.  One example of this is archives, or collections of papers (personal or institutional).  Archives can range from the very small (one or two folders) […]

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Hebrew Mss @ CUL: The Pope, the Sun King, and a Hebrew prayerbook in Southern France

Throughout the centuries leading up to the French Revolution, the Jews of France were alternatively expelled and invited back many times (the 14th and 17th centuries were particularly confusing in this regard).  Throughout this time, however, there were four cities that remained consistently safe for Jews.  Ironically (but perhaps not too surprisingly for those familiar […]

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Staying on top of research: Rambi feeds and Google Reader

With so much work being published in so many different forums in today’s world, it is hard to know when relevant research is published.  Enter a match made in heaven: RAMBI feeds and Google Reader! RAMBI, discussed earlier here, is a catalog of articles and chapters in the field of Jewish Studies.  RAMBI allows scholars […]

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