Norman E. Alexander Library for Jewish Studies

02/05/2026

Have you seen our latest exhibit, “Jewish Studies at Columbia: From Samuel Johnson to the IIJS”?

https://blogs.library.columbia.edu/jewishstudiesatcul/2025/12/03/exhibition-jewish-studies-at-columbia-from-samuel-johnson-to-the-iijs/

On display on the third floor of Butler Library through March 22!

09/29/2025

Did you notice this lovely chap while strolling toward the circulation desk on the third floor of Butler? It's part of a new exhibition created and curated by a student from the School of the Arts: "Streets Taken: Photographs by Edward Schwartz with new works by Francisco Javier Ramírez."

09/26/2025

Save the date! This year's Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections will be on December 1. "Beyond the Text: Reading Jewish History Between the Words" with Prof. Edward Fram, Columbia's own Prof. Elisheva Carlebach, and Dr. Eugene Matanky. Register here:

This year's annual NEA Celebration of Collections has an early modern focus, where three scholars will discuss their research on what we find in books when we look beyond the actual texts - at annotations, illustrations, and other paratexts. Professor Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia University) will di...

04/23/2025

We're excited about a new exhibition up The Burke Library - Columbia University featuring UTS MS 74, a 14th century Hebrew Bible with Judeo-Spanish inscriptions and gorgeous micrography of the Masorah.

The focus of "Restored to Perfection? Inside the Remaking of a Fourteenth-Century Hebrew Bible" is the incredible conservation work that will preserve it well into the future.

If you can't make it to Burke, you can see the manuscript in its entirety online: https://archive.org/details/ldpd_17650687_000/

02/27/2025

New post, highlighting both old and new collections:

This was originally written for the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies' magazine, 2024 edition. It is presented here with some light edits and news about a recent acquisition since the article was first published. The country of Yemen, at the entrance of the Red Sea, has been in the new

01/16/2025

New post from our student assistant, Relly Robinson (BC '25), who went through all of the issues of the Seth Low Scop to allow us to digitize it - and to share the thoughts of the students from Seth Low Jr. College - in their own words:

Relly Robinson, BC '25, is a Barnard College senior majoring in English. I have been working for Michelle Margolis at the Jewish Studies department of Columbia Libraries for over two years. In that time I have worked on countless different projects that make up a small part of our libraries

01/08/2025

New post in the series!

On Sephardic music at the Casa Hispanica, Butler's intervention to hire Lionel Trilling, and the significant work of Columbia's faculty to assist Jewish refugees during WWII

Once again, many thanks to Joanna Rios and Jocelyn Wilk for their assistance with tracking down citations - and always suggesting good rabbitholes for further research! Notwithstanding the difficulties of the earlier years of Nicholas Murray Butler's presidency, and the rising antisemitism in oth

12/20/2024

New post: We have an amazing collection of artists' books in RBML, with quite a number of Jewish examples!

On the website of Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, under "What we collect," there's an intriguing designation: "Printing History and Book Arts." The description reads: The Book Arts have been a collecting focus of RBML since its inception in 1930. It contains both “books about books

12/10/2024

Did you miss our fantastic Norman E. Alexander Library Celebration of Collections last week? You can see it here:

The 2024 Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collection featured Rowan Dorin and Edward Loss on Jewish criminal cases in Bologna in the 15th century, Pavel Sládek…

12/05/2024

12/05/2024

Join us TODAY at 12 PM EST for stories of the Inquisition in Bologna, the Jewish community in Prague, and the early history of Jewish women at Barnard. Link below!

The Annual Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections will feature the following talks: Blood and Money: Jews and Justice in the Archives of a Late Medieval Italian City (Rowan Dorin, Stanford University) The story of illness and recovery of Isaac Poppers of Prague (1772) from a previously unkno...