Posts tagged Research and Reference Services
16th Street
presented by the Center for Jewish History
Wonderful research project (using archives housed at the Center for Jewish History) turned into film.
Aspirin. Nobel Prizes. Flintstones vitamins. Slavery. War crimes. Mass murder. A brilliant company that made a killing. Literally.
Click on the above link to learn more about A Deal with the Devil—How I.G. Farben Turned Good Into Evil.
Our new microfilm readers await you!
by Zachary Loeb, MSIS, Patron Services Librarian, Center for Jewish History
If you love microfilm (and Jewish history), then the Center for Jewish History is the place for you! Between the collections of the five partners at the Center for Jewish History and the items on extended loan in the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, the Center has thousands of reels of microfilm, featuring everything from archival collections to newspapers to genealogical records. The Center is proud to announce that patrons using microfilm will now be able to use brand new ScanPro 2000 digital microfilm readers!
The ScanPro 2000 provides patrons with easy-to-use microfilm readers that offer a host of new functions and present crisp and clean images on 24-inch computer screens. With the simple click of a button, the ScanPro 2000 enables patrons to straighten images, zoom in and out, adjust brightness and contrast, and crop images.
As with the previous microfilm readers available at the Center, the ScanPro 2000s enable patrons to make printouts; however, unlike the previous microfilm readers, the ScanPro 2000s also allow patrons to easily save their images in the JPG, PDF, and other image formats, so that they may be e-mailed or saved to a “jump drive.”
In addition, the ScanPro 2000 allows for saved images to be easily converted into a Word-searchable format, which makes finding the relevant information much easier (though this function works best with microfilm in English). And with its simple “Film Selection Wizard” (to say nothing of the knowledgeable staff at CJH), the ScanPro 2000 makes it easy for microfilm users to get to work, regardless of how much experience they previously have working with microfilm.
The Center for Jewish History is proud to offer eight ScanPro 2000s for patron use. If you are planning a visit to the Lillian Goldman Reading Room or the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and you anticipate using microfilm, we recommend that you reserve a machine. Please be aware that all microfilm use is subject to copyright and fair use restrictions. To make a microfilm reader reservation, please call (917) 606-8217.
National Poetry Month
On a Poem by Leyb Kvitko
by J.D. Arden, M.L.I.S. candidate, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History
Inscrutable Cat
by Leyb Kvitko (c.1890-1952),
translated from Yiddish by A. Mandelbaum & H. Rabinowitz
This poem is taken from The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, published in 1987, and is one of many such books available in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room at the Center for Jewish History.
Inscrutable cat!
I am as still, as still as you,
Although you tread with shadow-steps -
The peace of distant worlds within your gaze
So softly in the shadows of my rage…
I am as still, as still as you…
Along my meager island shore -
The island of my memory - where ruins flicker faintly through
Awareness with its waves, its fog,
On that pathetic island
At times there creeps an ancient frog.
Lazily he looks about, lazily he croaks -
At all that was, the old, the shriveled heretofore.
Then lazily he turns around; he croaks another croak -
At the insane, the stolen here and now.
In me the present and the past are soon to speak no more.
Only the croaking will be etched into my island shore.
I start to sink into a shapeless torpor
And -
I am as still, as still as you…
National Poetry Month
On a Poem by Yehudah Amichai
by J.D. Arden, M.L.I.S. candidate, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History
The poem “First Resurrection” (תחייה ראשונה) is from the poem cycle “Four Resurrections in the Valley of the Ghosts” by Yehudah Amichai (יהודה עמיחי 1924-2000), read in Hebrew above by writer Leon Wieseltier as part of the “CultureBuzz” Amichai poetry series on YouTube.
The English translation below is from the book Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994.
More books by Yehuda Amichai and Leon Wieseltier are available to discover at the Center for Jewish History. You can search the collections by clicking here.
First Resurrection
A woman who looks like my mother sees a man who looks like me,
They pass each other without turning around.
Mistakes are marvelous and simple as life and death,
As the arithmetic book of a small child.
In the shelter for wayward girls, girls singing on the balcony
Hang their clothes out to dry, banners of love.
In the fiber institute they make ropes of fiber
To bind souls in the bundle of life.
An afternoon wind blows, as if asking:
What did you do, what did you talk about.
In old stone houses young women do in the day
What mothers of their mothers dreamed of doing at night.
The Armenian church is empty and closed
Like an abandoned wife whose husband went far off and disappeared.
Wayward girls sing, “God will bring the dead to life
In His great mercy” and fold their dried clothes.
“Blessed forever be His name.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) begins this evening (Sunday, April 7) and ends the evening of Monday, April 8.
Nearly 25 percent of research inquiries performed at the Center for Jewish History have been related to the study of the Holocaust. The Center’s librarians produce monthly reports on patrons’ research activities, and requests for Holocaust-related items are often at the top of the list.
In 2007, the Center completed Holocaust Resources: An Annotated Bibliography of Archival Holdings at the Center for Jewish History, one of the most highly utilized products the Center has ever produced. The bibliography included 2,273 entries for collections from the five partners of the Center. The project consisted primarily of identifying relevant archival collections and writing a bibliographic description.
The Center also undertook a retrospective conversion that integrated its partner legacy databases into its online catalog, allowing materials from the destroyed European communities of the 1920s and 1930s to be accessed by researchers worldwide.
To search the collections now, click here.
