The Library provides access to thousands of periodicals and reference sources in the research databases listed below. HUC faculty, staff, students, and alumni should use their Single Sign On credentials to access these resources when off-campus. For login assistance, please contact the IT department at techsupport@huc.edu.
Learn how to access and maximize the HUC-JIR Library resources.
Find books, journals, recorded music, scores, and more! (Open Access)
Academic Search Premier is a multi-disciplinary research database that provides full text journal and magazine articles, as well as video content from the Associated Press. You will be able to find a good number of articles on just about any topic, making this a good starting point for research projects. (HUC Login, Campus Access)
Produced by the American Theological Library Association, this database provides the full text of many articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as citations to essays and chapters of books in the areas of Bible, religion, ethics, and philosophy. This is a wonderful resource for learning about concepts that are common between different religions and how they are practiced or interpreted differently. Some interesting examples include, biblical Jubilee, resurrection, and technology in worship, to name a few. (HUC Login, Campus Access)
The Bar Ilan Responsa Project has a tremendous collection of texts from the Oral Torah. It includes works of midrash, biblical exegesis, mussar, and philosophy. Additionally, there are full texts of Responsa from Rishonim (the Rabbis of the 11th-15th centuries) Achronim (the Rabbis from the 16th century and onwards) as well as contemporary Rabbis (in the Orthodox tradition). These texts are all in Hebrew and Bar Ilan provides useful decoding tools including an abbreviation search and an Aramaic to Hebrew dictionary. It is continuously updated with additional content. (HUC Login)
Note that there is a free version with limited options.
This collection of Reform responsa includes articles organized topically in alphabetical order and through a basic search function. While the majority of these responsa do not include authorship information, answers to timely and important questions are detailed and include citations to sources. The majority of responsa are coauthored by the CCAR Responsa Committee, a diverse group of rabbis across America, selected for their expertise in Rabbinic texts. The responsa range from the early 1900s to the current year, with between 5-10 new responsa added yearly. Many of these responsa would serve as an interesting starting point for a sermon as the questions raised range from the basic foundations of Reform practice, to complex moral issues. To find additional citation information, cross-reference the issue abbreviations using their “Guide to Sources” or contact a librarian for further assistance. (Open Access)
Additionally, HUC Faculty, Students, and Alumni can access the full texts of the CCAR quarterly journals here. The collection is not searchable, so users will need complete citations in order to locate the desired material. (HUC Login)
Davka Writer is a Hebrew language word processing program (HUC Login via JSP).
The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library is a complete collection of the non-biblical Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran (as of 2006). It includes authoritative copies of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well as an authoritative English translation of each. It also includes images of the museum plate for each fragment of every text in this collection. Every text can be identified by column number and line number in an easily-accessible drop-down menu (HUC Login via JSP).
ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. It indexes articles, chapters of books, professional literature, and grey literature in the field of education. While not a robust offering of material related to Jewish education, with some flexible thinking this can be very useful for example, in appropriating an Earth Day themed lesson for Tu b’Shevat. Many items here are available in full text and we can also be contacted at ill.cn@huc.edu with citation information in order to obtain for you a digital file of any articles without full-text that you would like to explore further. (HUC Login, Campus Access).
Search full text of American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Jewish Exponent, and the American Israelite (the country’s oldest English language Jewish paper and founded by Isaac M. Wise). Articles, advertisements, editorials, etc. are all fully searchable. Original printing in PDF form may be viewed and the newspapers can be browsed by issue. Read about when the first American-published Reform siddur was adopted in Cincinnati’s Bnai Yeshurun, historical notices celebrating the birth of Israel as a state, and more. (HUC Login, Campus Access)
Search Hebrew journals and newspapers. Some full text. In Hebrew. (HUC Login)
HUC subscribes to JSTOR’s Jewish and Hebrew ebook and journal collections. Here you may find full-text sources on topics within Jewish literature, Jewish history, Israeli politics, and religious philosophy. Books and articles can be saved for later reference by creating a personal JSTOR account. (HUC Login, Campus Access)
A collection of scholarly Hebrew ebooks covering Israeli politics and history, Judaism, the sciences, philosophy, and law, Kotar provides full access to over 3,000 ebooks. Create your own account with Kotar to enable highlighting and note-taking within an ebook so you can organize and save all your research. (HUC Login, Campus Access)
Otzar HaHochma contains approximately 120,000 older and newer editions of sefarim and manuscripts in searchable text, including:
Our subscription to Otzar HaHochma allows one researcher to use the software at a time, for up to 30-minutes per login. You may create a personal username to save your history and lists. Please log out when you finish so another researcher may use the product.
Produced by the National Library of Israel, RAMBI is an index of scholarly articles on religion, social science, and humanities in many languages. It is best used for creating citations or bibliographies for articles you already have whose origins became obscured over time, or for browsing for content that will then be accessed through the HUC student and alumni subscription portals (the Jewish Studies Portal or Single Sign On). Many of the items can also be requested through interlibrary loan agreements we have with other universities and you may send any citations to ill.cn@huc.edu to place a request for the online article to be emailed to you. (Open Access)
