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From Ashkenaz to Zionism: Putting Eastern European Jewish Life in (Alphabetical) Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2009

Jeffrey Veidlinger
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
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Extract

The publication of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is a monumental achievement. It is the type of text that can transform a discipline, providing easily accessible and reasonably accurate answers to common reference questions and summarizing the state of the field in an evenhanded and inclusive manner. As one of the nearly 450 contributors to the encyclopedia, I personally feel a great deal of pride in its outcome. The two-volume, 2,400-page encyclopedia includes more than 1,800 entries, almost 1,200 illustrations, 57 color plates, and 55 maps. Editor in chief Gershon David Hundert of McGill University has succeeded in producing, as YIVO claims, “the definitive reference work on all aspects of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present.”

Type
Review Essay
Information
AJS Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , November 2009 , pp. 379 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2009

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References

1. I wrote six entries and am listed as a coauthor of a seventh. Given the large number of contributors, the editors of the AJS Review did not believe that my contribution posed a conflict in writing this essay.

2. See http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=136&aid=351.

3. Smith, J. M. P., Moncrief, J. W., Votaw, C. W., and Muss-Arnolt, W. “Review: Recent Encyclopædic and Bibliographical Literature,” American Journal of Theology 9, no. 3 (July 1905): 524Google Scholar.

4. I have written about this phenomenon in Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

5. Greenstone, Julius H., “Review: Encyclopedia Judaica,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 28, no. 4 (April 1938): 379CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Zeitlin, Solomon, “Encyclopaedia Judaica: The Status of Jewish Scholarship,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 63, no. 1 (July 1972): 27–28Google Scholar. For more on the Jewish Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Judaica, see David B. Levy, “The Making of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and The Jewish Encyclopedia,” Proceedings of the 37th Annual Convention of the Association of Jewish Libraries (New York: Association of Jewish Libraries, 2002), available at http://www.jewishlibraries.org/ajlweb/publications/proceedings/proceedings2002/levy.pdf.

7. Trachtenberg, Barry, “Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the Holocaust and the Changing Mission of Yiddish Scholarship,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 3 (2006): 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See http://www.yivoinstitute.org/index.php?aid=269&tid=109 (accessed May 4, 2009).

9. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 22 vols., ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007).

10. See http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/preface.jsp.

11. Yehuda Slutsky, “Pale of Settlement,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 15:577–80.