Jewish Studies

Presently numbering in excess of 350,000 volumes, the collections consist of materials relating to Jewish history, religion, language, society, and culture from around the world. Current and retrospective materials in all languages are collected in print, microform, and electronic formats and include monographs, serial publications, reference works, dissertations, and conference proceedings. While the largest number of holdings are in Hebrew and Yiddish, the collection includes materials in all western languages. Especially noteworthy are the Early Italian Hebraica Collection, which is included in the Ahmanson-Murphy Early Italian Printing Collection Hebrew manuscript holdings, including the Rosenberg-Lewin Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts, Cummings Collection of Hebraica and Judaica, and the Feldman Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts; and a collection of Yizkor books numbering over 500 volumes (see below).

In his role as the previous Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies Bibliographer, David Hirsch received three grants from the Librarians Association of the University of California for a project entitled Bibliographic Access to Materials in Latin American Jewish Studies. He traveled to Latin America in 1992, 1994 and 1997 to collect publications from the area. A bibliography of these acquisitions organized by country, entitled, Latin American Jewish Studies: a bibliography of recent acquisitions in the UCLA Research Library, can be accessed in PDF format below. During the past several years, there has been significant interest in Latin American Jewish fiction and poetry. For a list of selected titles, many of which are owned by UCLA, please see the PDF, Latin American Jewish Fiction, Poetry, Theatre and Film: A Bibliography of Works Published from 1996-, below.

The UCLA Jewish Studies collections support teaching and research activities for a number of campus academic departments, organized research units, and interdepartmental degree programs. Principal among these are the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Germanic Languages, English, History, Political Science, the Israel Studies Program, and the Center for Jewish Studies.

Most area materials are housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library, which concentrates on acquiring research-level materials in the humanities and social sciences. Publications in other disciplines are collected by specialized campus libraries; the Biomedical Library, the Science and Engineering Libraries, the Arts Library, the Music Library, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the Law Library, and the Management Library collect area materials in their particular subject fields. The College Library collects mainly English-language area materials in a broad range of subjects at the undergraduate level.