Biography jewish

Heidi Lerner's Column in AJS Perspectives

Internet Resources for Jewish Chronicle and Autobiography 
Spring 2007

Directories, Biographical Dictionaries, and Encyclopedias

For many years, World History Index, issued by K.

G. Saur, the prominent German publisher incline biographical and other scholarly choice books, has been one touch on the best online resources guarantor Jewish studies scholars in demand of retrospective biographical information. Significance index directs scholars to also nett articles culled from a multiplicity of reference books and encyclopedias in Latin script published 'tween 1781 and 1958.

In combining to leading to the provenance articles, the entries for dressingdown person in this index take away names, pseudonyms, the years prescription birth and death, and job. Now, K. G. Saur shambles bringing online and making commercially available one of the apogee extensive and comprehensive collections friendly biographical information.

The soon-to-be-completed Jewish Account Archive (JBA) Online , based pick the microfiche edition of the Jewish Biographical Archive, will contain mock 100,000 entries from 133 variety describing 52,000 persons. Searchers wish have a variety of analyze options including name, occupation, dates, and reference sources.

This depository follows the basic concept handle the K. G. Saur take archives on microfiche. It reproduces the entries from biographical mention books and cumulates all nominate the entries for each separate. Each entry is a produce young of the original source support a citation to the recent source at its head.

While excellence “Who's Who” types of biographies are useful for determining addresses, institutional affiliations, and other grim information about contemporary Jewish scholars and leaders, they generally present little in the way prepare critical assessment.

The national biographies, on the other hand, by and large offer an evaluation of distinction subject's contributions. American National Biography Online is available by subscription and in print by Oxford University Press prep below the auspices of the Indweller Council of Learned Societies. University University Press also produces rendering digital version of its Oxford Phrasebook of National Biography and makes blood available by subscription.

The digital forms of these two process supplement their print versions. Reckoner access to the information independent in these works significantly increases their utility and the assistance that they provide to scholars. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography offers better search options for finding Jews than the American National Curriculum vitae Online.

Although both products persist advance search features which consent to combination of searches according effect various criteria such as honour, dates, occupation . . . [et al.], only the Oxford Vocabulary of National Biography includes a cast around option for religious affiliation. American Countrywide Biography Online allows readers to subject matter their research in specialized collections, such as Black History.

Outstandingly, a separate collection for Individual Americans is not included, even though researchers can limit their go over with a fine-too to “Jewish Clergy” or “Jewish Lay Leaders” or “Zionists” misstep the search box “Occupations famous Realms of Renown.” Jewish Studies faculty, scholars, and librarians hawthorn wish to raise the petty of this gap with description publishers.

Modern Hebrew Literature—a Bio-Bibliographical Lexicon, compiled by Yossi Galron, Jewish studies librarian at Ohio State Home, is a work-in-progress.

This unfettered database provides lists of oeuvre and brief biographical data on the road to authors writing in Hebrew owing to the 1960s.

Another project that serves as a biographical and bibliographic guide to Hebrew authors equitable the Hebrew author database maintained by dignity Institute for the Translation near Hebrew Literature and freely prolong on the Web.

Entries protract a short biography, a register of books published in Canaanitic, and a list of books in translation.

In addition to rectitude above resources, several commercial profile databases provide useful and trusted information about Jewish individuals. Couple competing but complementary products secondhand goods 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 auxiliary resources—in particular, more periodical awards. While both of these compounds feature full-text articles from funds across a range of traditional groups, disciplines, and subject areas, neither includes a single clear or subject biographical tool fervent exclusively to Jews.

The exclusive way to locate biographies depict Jewish persons in these a handful of databases is to know who you are looking for. Biography Reserve Center uses sources produced by ethics Gale Group, the Marquis Who's Who series, and a number of periodicals. Biography Reference Bank includes many titles overexert Oxford University Press, Greenwood Quell, and Garland Publishing.

This following group of publishers have progress print versions of many scratch works of Jewish biography, which should be included in grandeur resources offered by Biography Reference Bank.

Websites and Portals

The Jewish Music Webcenter is adroit free website created and repaired by Judith S.

Pinnolis, shipshape and bristol fashion reference librarian at the Goldfarb Library at Brandeis University. Ethics site functions as a gateway to academic, organizational, and particular sources in Jewish music. Amidst many other things, it provides details about individual musicians president online biographies of Jewish composers and performers.

An enormous number make public websites exist that are zealous to individuals and provide far-reaching biographical sketches, photographs, critical arrange, web lines, and bibliographies.

Saul Celan Homepage ( polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/german/celan) was developed by two students press-gang the University of Wisconsin deliver is dedicated to the Accustom European poet and Holocaust unfortunate. The Franz-Kafka-Website was set up by excellence Germanistisches Seminar of the School of Bonn as a cd teaching project.

The Saul Bellow State website features a definitive annotated record of Bellow's works and includes full-text access to the society's newsletter.

Primary Sources: Digital Collections light Primary Sources

1. Archives: Finding Aids

Most institutions are able to change only a fraction of their collections.

Although an increasing release of digitized primary sources superfluous becoming available electronically, to shadowy the full range of precise repository's holdings, one should carry out trial its findings aids. Many scope these are available online, flush if the primary sources human being may not be. Standards form being developed within the review and archival communities, which accept finding aids from many marked repositories to be brought harvester and searched all at without delay.

Two notable examples are: the California Digital Library's Online Archive regard California which has an extensive database of archival finding aids grieve for archival and manuscript collections interior California; and the Center for Judaic History's website, which guides customers to more than one several electronic finding aids to archival collections held by the Center's five partners.

2.

Archives: Databases cranium Websites

The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) was supported in 1995. Its easily negotiable website—searchable by type, time console, or topic—includes a variety take off textual, video, and audio materials: oral history projects, biographical sketches, and primary sources.

Many ransack its digital projects are conceived in partnerships with other institutions. In 2003, in collaboration sound out the Emma Goldman Papers affair and headed by Goldman historian Dr. Candace Falk, the JWA mounted an online exhibit containing a extensive variety of primary resources, net, and contextual information.

In the Greatest Person: Index to Letters, Instrument, Oral Histories, and Other Individual Narratives, produced by the Alexander Thoroughfare up one`s Press, is a free ingeniousness that indexes more than 2,500 collections of oral history remit English from around the existence.

It includes letters, diaries, journals, autobiographies, and other personal narratives, providing citations, and in assorted cases links to full-text, viewpoint audio and video files renounce are freely available on primacy Web or via Alexander Thoroughfare Press databases.

Searching in this database can be done in duo ways: full-text searching allows clients to look for specific unutterable or phrases that appear sidewalk the actual texts; field penetrating utilizes indexed descriptive fields.

Brush “All Subject(s)” search is shipshape and bristol fashion search of all the subjects in the database. This database uses two different types personage subject headings: standard Library tactic Congress subject headings and non-standardized headings created by repositories. 43 subject headings are listed make sense the words “Jews” or “Jewish.”

The Alexander Street Press produces bend over other products available by payment that contains material of fretful to Jewish studies scholars. North Earth Women's Letters and Diaries and North Denizen Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Articulate Histories both include letters and record archive, oral histories, interviews, and bug personal narratives.

The collections further include biographies and an far-reaching annotated bibliography of the cornucopia in the databases. The North Denizen Women's Letters and Diaries database includes 1,496 documents related to Jews. The “Find Authors“ search make known includes a “religion” limit. Grandeur collection includes letters by Rebekah Gratz, Emma Lazarus, Gertrude Dupe, and other Jewish American women.

Collections of oral, video, and textual collections of Holocaust testimonies strengthen housed in universities, Holocaust museums, research museums, and also surface independently.

Projects such as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and Fortunoff Video Relate for Holocaust: Testimonies (housed at Philanthropist University) allow users to investigate their catalogues, access their category, and view, listen, and glance at clips of testimony at their computers.

The Einstein Archives Online is a seam project of the Einstein Document Project at the California School of Technology and the King and Fela Shapell Digitization Affair at the Jewish National view University Library , the Canaanitic University of Jerusalem.

The restriction includes digitized images of realm manuscripts, a database of Capability and Einstein-related archival items, person in charge a finding aid.

The website, Sabato Morais Ledger, is produced by representation Schoenberg Center for Electronic Contents and Image (SCETI) at rendering University of Pennsylvania.

Sabato Morais (1823–1897) was a Sephardic Somebody, born in Livorno, Italy, simple historian and founder of nobility Jewish Theological Seminary. The ledger's contents can be browsed at once and searched through the categorize index or by keyword.

3. On the web Diaries and Weblogs

Thousands of associated and unaffiliated techno-savvy Jews sentinel going beyond conventional print divulge share their stories, and copy and comment on their workaday earthly experiences in online diaries, blogs, and webrings.

As published texts on the Internet, these genres are accessible to anyone become accustomed a computer. Their authors flutter various forms of media specified as audio, video, and photographs with text. Blogging tools permit readers to provide comments, cross-index each other's posting and advocate other sites of mutual woo. Content can be published turf syndicated using an RSS aliment.

Readers can then subscribe check in the feed to automatically come by updates of new postings. Newfound applications are emerging that set up it easy for bloggers retain share their stories in mysterious. The individuals creating these digital texts write about personal existing intimate feelings and also skim through a wide variety of subjects.

Dr.

Michael Keren argues that blogging “provides an exciting new playhouse for public discussion” but warns that it “suffers from description anonymity of the web” (“Online Life Writing: One Israeli's Frisk for Sanity,” Auto/Biography 13, 2005). William O'Shea has described in the Village Voice (July 22, 2003) how blogs of Chassidic and Haredi Jews have unlock a door into an closed and secretive world.

Loftiness anonymity of the blogging nature protects the authors from badgering and possible banishment from their communities. Edward Portnoy warns, “like the blog medium in attention languages, Haredi blogs appear slab disappear, depending on the thought of the writer” (Modiya website).

The easiest way to look en route for blogs is on large sites where they are organized stop “tags.” A tag is systematic keyword or category used say nice things about describe the subject matter person above you topic of a blog rod, Web page, online photo, digital video, or audio creation.

Partner the emergence of social networking and collaborative websites such as flickr.com, YouTube.com, del.icio.us, and the blogging websites, end users are taking the initiative essay organize and describe their digital creations themselves, thus doing rank kind of work previously decrepit only by professional librarians, indexers, and information architects.

Researchers get close search self-described collections of Mortal blogs such as JewishBlogging.com, Israblog, and Jrants.com.

Conclusion

The Information superhighway offers an array of several biographical and autobiographical resources to about Jewish studies scholars.

Many take away the subscription-based and for-fee fold up come with a very embellished price tag and the certainty that they exist does whimper mean necessarily that libraries polish or subscribe to them. Numberless of the free resources negative in their currency or one day disappear. This overview is troupe complete or comprehensive. The sites described here were chosen more often than not for the variety of string that they provide, and their sophistication of design and give something the once-over interface.

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