Student Research Guide

Welcome to our student research guide for online resources in Jewish history and culture. The page is maintained by Simon Rabinovitch: email suggestions and new resources to s.rabinovitch@northeastern.edu.

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Northeastern Websites

• Northeastern Library Jewish Studies subject guide, compiled and maintained by librarian Debra Mandel. See also the article “Jewish Studies Research Resources and Information at your Fingertips” on the Northeastern Jewish Studies blog by Debra Mandel.
• Northeastern’s Holocaust Awareness Committee maintains its own digital archive. For more about this collection see the article “Delving into the Holocaust Awareness Committee Archives” on the Northeastern Jewish Studies blog by Jessie Sigler.
• Digital History of the Jews of Boston features story maps and visualization tools that explore the history of Boston’s Jews. The site was created by Simon Rabinovitch and exhibits research by Northeastern students.
• The Catskills Institute is a digital archive and exhibit space hosted by the Northeastern Library’s Digital Scholarship Group focusing contains the world’s largest collection of materials relating to the Jewish experience in the Catskills. For more about this collection see the article “Summer Vacation in the Catskills via the Catskills Institute Website” on the Northeastern Jewish Studies blog by Phil Brown.
• Rediscovering the Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Era is a digital history and research project created with the assistance of the New York Public Library retracing the lives and pathways of scholars who attempted to flee Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s.
• https://latinjewisharts.northeastern.edu/ is a website focused on Latin American Jewish writers and artists. These writers and artists come from Jewish communities spread across the vastness of Latin America.

Index of Articles on Jewish Studies (RAMBI)

RAMBI is a multilingual database of academic articles in Jewish studies and Israel studies maintained by the National Library of Israel and updated daily.

Open-Access Databases of Jewish Newspapers

• The Tel Aviv University and National Library of Israel Historical Jewish Press site has digitized hundreds of historical newspapers in a dozen languages, with more added all the time.
• The Internet Archive of German-Jewish Periodicals, know as Compact Memory, is a project of Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, and includes digitizations of 335 Jewish newspapers and journals of German-speaking Europe between 1768 and 1938.
• The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is an open-access digital archive of its global news coverage going back to 1923.

Archive and Library Websites with Digital Materials

• The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at New England Historic Genealogical Society maintains extensive digitized archival, print, and photographic records relating to the Jewish community in Boston.
• The National Library of Israel has digitized many rare books, images, newspapers, and exhibits (see especially its Historical Jewish Press site listed above).
• Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project is a collaboration between Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Vatican Library to digitize and make available to the public Hebrew manuscripts, as well as Greek and Latin manuscripts and early printed books.
• American Jewish Committee Archives includes films, television, radio, oral histories and digitized documents pertaining to the New York-based AJC’s advocacy.
• The American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives has extensively digitized its collections, including 75,000 photographs.
• The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem includes digitized finding aids and an online catalog (through the National Library of Israel) with digitized images.
• The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem includes some selected documents digitized from its collections.
• Blatavnik Archive is a nonprofit foundation collecting documentation primarily on twentieth-century Jewish history (and in particular Soviet and Russian Jewish history).
• The Center for Jewish History in New York houses the following five institutions and maintains a consolidated catalogue for searching its archival, library, and other collections:

1. American Jewish Historical Society.
2. American Sephardi Federation.
3. Leo Baeck Institute (focusing on German Jewry).
4. Yeshiva University Museum.
5. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (focusing on the history and culture of Ashkenazi Jewry, in particular in Eastern Europe. See also the article “Learning about and through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research” on the Northeastern Jewish Studies blog by Simon Rabinovitch).

Reference and Texts

• The YIVO Enclyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is an online encylopedia with articles from leading scholars and links to many of YIVO’s digitized resources, especially photographs and documents.
• Sefaria: A Living Library of Jewish Texts provides fully searchable texts of the Talmud, Mishnah, Tanakh and many other important Jewish religious and legal works.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online encyclopedia with articles on all aspects of philosophy, including many excellent entries relating to Jewish philosophy, religious ideas, and controversies (see for example “Maimonides,” “mysticism,” and “Spinoza”).
• Fordham Internet Jewish History Sourcebook was one of the first digital resources curating translated primary sources from around the web (not just for Jewish history) for use by students, teachers, and the public.

Music

• Milken Archive of Jewish Music documents the history of Jewish music in America with hundreds of recordings and oral histories.
• Sephardic Music: A Century of Recordings is a website showcasing over 100 years of recorded Sephardic music. See also the article “In Search of Sephardic Music” on the Northeastern Jewish Studies by Joel Bresler (the website’s creator, and a member of the Jewish Studies Academic Advisory Board).
• Der yidisher gramofon includes a discography of early European recordings of Jewish music.

Other Important Digital Resources

• Diarna: The Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life is a collection of curated digital exhibits and interactive maps tracing Jewish history in North Africa and the Middle East.
• Key Documents of German-Jewish History: A Digital Source Edition is published by the Institute for the History of German Jews. Its digital documents focus on Hamburg’s Jewish history from the early modern period to the present.
• The Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History is a searchable catalog of resources related to Jewish history from around the web.
• Brandeis University Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Research Guide provides links to resources (many requiring subscription, but often available through the Northeastern University Library) on all aspects of Israel studies, including literature, media, history, and politics.
• HaMapah: Quantitative Analysis of Rabbinic Literature uses quantitative and geographic analysis to visualize the dissemination of rabbinic literature.
• Digital Second Edition of Judaica Americana was created as a Judaica digital humanities project by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and expands on Robert Singerman’s two-volume 1990 edition of Judaica Americana to create a searchable bibliography of thousands of American publications of Jewish interest.
• British Library Voices of the Holocaust Online Exhibit is a collection of oral history testimonies by Holocaust survivors who came to Britain during World War II and after.
• Jewish Book Cultures in the Early Modern World was originally created by Michelle Margolis for the Columbia University class by the same title, and provides a digital guided tour through the history of the Jewish book.