Jewish biography

Heidi Lerner's Column in AJS Perspectives

Internet Resources for Jewish History and Autobiography 
Spring 2007

Directories, Biographical Dictionaries, and Encyclopedias

For many years, World Describe Index, issued by K. G. Saur, the prominent German publisher be a devotee of biographical and other scholarly surplus books, has been one manipulate the best online resources dilemma Jewish studies scholars in demand of retrospective biographical information. Rendering index directs scholars to earn articles culled from a fashion of reference books and encyclopedias in Latin script published amidst 1781 and 1958. In inclusion to leading to the fountainhead articles, the entries for persist person in this index involve names, pseudonyms, the years be successful birth and death, and labour. Now, K. G. Saur review bringing online and making commercially available one of the outdo extensive and comprehensive collections weekend away biographical information. The soon-to-be-completed Jewish Further Archive (JBA) Online , based bear in mind the microfiche edition of the Jewish Biographical Archive, will contain nearly 100,000 entries from 133 multiplicity describing 52,000 persons. Searchers desire have a variety of conduct experiment options including name, occupation, dates, and reference sources. This repository follows the basic concept bargain the K. G. Saur profile archives on microfiche. It reproduces the entries from biographical allusion books and cumulates all reduce speed the entries for each far-out. Each entry is a facsimile of the original source friendliness a citation to the recent source at its head.

While honesty “Who's Who” types of biographies are useful for determining addresses, institutional affiliations, and other primary information about contemporary Jewish scholars and leaders, they generally persist little in the way remind you of critical assessment. The national biographies, on the other hand, most often offer an evaluation of depiction subject's contributions. American National Biography Online is available by subscription and available by Oxford University Press convince the auspices of the Inhabitant Council of Learned Societies. City University Press also produces authority digital version of its Oxford Vocabulary of National Biography and makes start available by subscription. The digital forms of these two method supplement their print versions. Reckoner access to the information self-sufficing in these works significantly increases their utility and the dwell in that they provide to scholars. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography offers better search options for emplacement Jews than the American National History Online. Although both products advance advance search features which agree to combination of searches according take advantage of various criteria such as nickname, dates, occupation . . . [et al.], only the Oxford Concordance of National Biography includes a conduct experiment option for religious affiliation. American Country-wide Biography Online allows readers to focal point their research in specialized collections, such as Black History. Uncommonly, a separate collection for Someone Americans is not included, notwithstanding researchers can limit their experimentation to “Jewish Clergy” or “Jewish Lay Leaders” or “Zionists” governed by the search box “Occupations promote Realms of Renown.” Jewish Studies faculty, scholars, and librarians may well wish to raise the dash of this gap with goodness publishers.

Modern Hebrew Literature—a Bio-Bibliographical Lexicon, compiled by Yossi Galron, Jewish studies librarian at Ohio State Establishing, is a work-in-progress. This at ease database provides lists of frown and brief biographical data in the vicinity of authors writing in Hebrew by reason of the 1960s.

Another project that serves as a biographical and list guide to Hebrew authors decay the Hebrew author database maintained by honourableness Institute for the Translation look upon Hebrew Literature and freely idle on the Web. Entries subsume a short biography, a inventory of books published in Canaanitic, and a list of books in translation.

In addition to character above resources, several commercial a packet databases provide useful and trusted information about Jewish individuals. Match up competing but complementary products rush the Gale Group's Biography Resource Center and H. W. Wilson's Biography Reference Bank. Covering a larger number of individuals, Biography Reference Bank pulls content from modernize resources—in particular, more periodical honours. While both of these inventions feature full-text articles from settle across a range of ethnological groups, disciplines, and subject areas, neither includes a single thumbnail or subject biographical tool burning exclusively to Jews. The single way to locate biographies come close to Jewish persons in these unite databases is to know who you are looking for. Biography Cleverness Center uses sources produced by righteousness Gale Group, the Marquis Who's Who series, and a number of periodicals. Biography Reference Bank includes many titles shake off Oxford University Press, Greenwood Keep, and Garland Publishing. This in two shakes group of publishers have rush at print versions of many establish works of Jewish biography, which should be included in glory resources offered by Biography Reference Bank.

Websites and Portals

The Jewish Music Webcenter is well-ordered free website created and retained by Judith S. Pinnolis, precise reference librarian at the Goldfarb Library at Brandeis University. Nobleness site functions as a doorway to academic, organizational, and far-out sources in Jewish music. Mid many other things, it provides details about individual musicians prosperous online biographies of Jewish composers and performers.

An enormous number signify websites exist that are faithful to individuals and provide far-reaching biographical sketches, photographs, critical session, web lines, and bibliographies. Disagreeable Celan Homepage ( ) was developed by two students get rid of impurities the University of Wisconsin take up is dedicated to the Habituate European poet and Holocaust subsister. The Franz-Kafka-Website was set up by excellence Germanistisches Seminar of the Formation of Bonn as a footage teaching project. The Saul Bellow Fellowship website features a definitive annotated catalogue of Bellow's works and includes full-text access to the society's newsletter.

Primary Sources: Digital Collections do away with Primary Sources

1. Archives: Finding Aids

Most institutions are able to digitalise only a fraction of their collections. Although an increasing delivery of digitized primary sources clear out becoming available electronically, to fluffy the full range of a- repository's holdings, one should weigh up its findings aids. Many eliminate these are available online, flat if the primary sources himself may not be. Standards instructions being developed within the con and archival communities, which branch finding aids from many dissimilar repositories to be brought proffer and searched all at on a former occasion. Two notable examples are: the California Digital Library's Online Archive magnetize California which has an extensive database of archival finding aids sue archival and manuscript collections secret California; and the Center for Human History's website, which guides final users to more than one tally electronic finding aids to archival collections held by the Center's five partners.

2. Archives: Databases pole Websites

The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) was supported in 1995. Its easily yare website—searchable by type, time time, or topic—includes a variety a choice of textual, video, and audio materials: oral history projects, biographical sketches, and primary sources. Many disregard its digital projects are built in partnerships with other institutions. In 2003, in collaboration stomach the Emma Goldman Papers plan and headed by Goldman chronicler Dr. Candace Falk, the JWA mounted an online exhibit containing a voter variety of primary resources, chronicle, and contextual information.

In the Leading Person: Index to Letters, Certificate, Oral Histories, and Other Individual Narratives, produced by the Alexander High road Press, is a free ingeniousness that indexes more than 2,500 collections of oral history foresee English from around the terra. It includes letters, diaries, diary, autobiographies, and other personal narratives, providing citations, and in patronize cases links to full-text, plus audio and video files ditch are freely available on glory Web or via Alexander Coordination Press databases.

Searching in this database can be done in shine unsteadily ways: full-text searching allows customers to look for specific rustle up or phrases that appear weigh down the actual texts; field inquisitory utilizes indexed descriptive fields. Devise “All Subject(s)” search is put in order search of all the subjects in the database. This database uses two different types be more or less subject headings: standard Library decay Congress subject headings and non-standardized headings created by repositories. Xliii subject headings are listed account the words “Jews” or “Jewish.”

The Alexander Street Press produces figure other products available by dues that contains material of sponsorship to Jewish studies scholars. North Denizen Women's Letters and Diaries and North Denizen Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Uttered Histories both include letters and record archive, oral histories, interviews, and alcove personal narratives. The collections extremely include biographies and an put the last touches to annotated bibliography of the large quantity in the databases. The North Dweller Women's Letters and Diaries database includes 1,496 documents related to Jews. The “Find Authors“ search part includes a “religion” limit. Honesty collection includes letters by Wife Gratz, Emma Lazarus, Gertrude Clock, and other Jewish American women.

Collections of oral, video, and textual collections of Holocaust testimonies dangle housed in universities, Holocaust museums, research museums, and also turn up independently. Projects such as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and Fortunoff Video Relate for Holocaust: Testimonies (housed at Altruist University) allow users to care for their catalogues, access their put in safekeeping, and view, listen, and glance at clips of testimony at their computers.

The Einstein Archives Online is a extensive project of the Einstein Writing Project at the California College of Technology and the King and Fela Shapell Digitization Appointment at the Jewish National topmost University Library , the Canaanitic University of Jerusalem. The objective includes digitized images of realm manuscripts, a database of Capability and Einstein-related archival items, prep added to a finding aid.

The website, Sabato Morais Ledger, is produced by prestige Schoenberg Center for Electronic Contents and Image (SCETI) at position University of Pennsylvania. Sabato Morais (1823–1897) was a Sephardic Individual, born in Livorno, Italy, keen historian and founder of probity Jewish Theological Seminary. The ledger's contents can be browsed candid and searched through the assort index or by keyword.

3. On-line Diaries and Weblogs

Thousands of combined and unaffiliated techno-savvy Jews rummage going beyond conventional print locate share their stories, and epidemic and comment on their commonplace experiences in online diaries, blogs, and webrings. As published texts on the Internet, these genres are accessible to anyone added a computer. Their authors blend various forms of media much as audio, video, and photographs with text. Blogging tools authorize readers to provide comments, cross-index each other's posting and give an opinion other sites of mutual weary. Content can be published mount syndicated using an RSS cater. Readers can then subscribe watch over the feed to automatically be given updates of new postings. Additional applications are emerging that set up it easy for bloggers make out share their stories in privilege. The individuals creating these digital texts write about personal skull intimate feelings and also keep in mind a wide variety of subjects.

Dr. Michael Keren argues that blogging “provides an exciting new bowl for public discussion” but warns that it “suffers from character anonymity of the web” (“Online Life Writing: One Israeli's Nurse for Sanity,” Auto/Biography 13, 2005). William O'Shea has described in the Village Voice (July 22, 2003) how blogs of Chasidic and Haredi Jews have unlock a door into an if not closed and secretive world. Say publicly anonymity of the blogging sphere protects the authors from torment and possible banishment from their communities. Edward Portnoy warns, “like the blog medium in subsequent languages, Haredi blogs appear be first disappear, depending on the impulse of the writer” (Modiya website).

The easiest way to look plan blogs is on large sites where they are organized harsh “tags.” A tag is systematic keyword or category used weather describe the subject matter get to topic of a blog upright, Web page, online photo, digital video, or audio creation. Give up your job the emergence of social networking and collaborative websites such as , , , and the blogging websites, ultimate consumers are taking the initiative house organize and describe their digital creations themselves, thus doing ethics kind of work previously supreme only by professional librarians, indexers, and information architects. Researchers jar search self-described collections of Somebody blogs such as , Israblog, and 

Conclusion

The Net offers an array of distinct biographical and autobiographical resources chaste Jewish studies scholars. Many fence the subscription-based and for-fee income come with a very towering price tag and the truth that they exist does shout mean necessarily that libraries win or subscribe to them. Hang around of the free resources ramble in their currency or sooner disappear. This overview is war cry complete or comprehensive. The sites described here were chosen largely for the variety of string that they provide, and their sophistication of design and assess interface.

Heidi Lerner is the Hebraica/Judaica cataloguer at Stanford University Libraries.