Needle in the Bookstacks - Library Blog

This month, the Jewish Book Carnival is hosted by the Prosen People. Check out their links!

“Ghetto Gelt: smuggled out of Warsaw, Poland…circa 1980”. A white post-it, attached to a plain envelope containing a few frayed paper bills, one coin. A gift from a friend of the Frances-Henry Library who had taken a tour of our Rare Book Room a few days earlier.

Just why are there so many rabbit hunting scenes in early Haggadot? The Klau Cincinnati Library explores this question in their latest exhibit.

I am excited to share my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Krasner, HUC professor of the American Jewish Experience and author of The Benderly Boys & American Jewish Education.

I just returned from Monterey California where once again librarians gathered from all over the country to discuss the latest in technology that affects our work and our world.

At this time of year, many of us are spending much time with our mahzor. While many of us are using the Gates of Repentance, Birnbaum or Koren, (I use the excellent Goldschmidt critical edition) many variations of the liturgy exist in manuscripts in the HUC collection and beyond.

“Zion” in Jewish scripture [mentioned 108 times] is sometimes the Holy City with its sacred associations, sometimes the sorrowful Land of Israel awaiting the return of her exiled children. The yearning for Zion in its religious, literary and political forms found expression in travel & photo books, Hebrew primers, pilgrimage diaries and religious pamphlets.
Our new display reflects some of the Frances-Henry Library’s holdings of this literature.

Two years ago we put together a small display of banned books at the Frances-Henry Library. We focused on censorship imposed on Jewish world texts, whether exercised by outsiders who banned, burned and “edited” Jewish sacred and secular texts, or by insiders; rabbis, librarians, teachers who stopped short of burning books, but did not shy away from banishing, banning and censoring books that they deemed blasphemous, inappropriate, and sacrilegious.

just initialed a purchase requisition for 14 books – not an uncommon act of an academic library’s director. The price tag: $3032.00 – less and less an uncommon price tag for scholarly publications. Why should you care? Because as I was excitedly reading the back-cover summaries and endorsements, pouring over their rich tables of content, and congratulating myself on once again putting our collection on the cutting edge of scholarship, it dawned on me that it may take a long time before anyone else gets excited over any of them, or over the total amounts that our library system invests in anticipating and meeting the needs of our faculty and students.