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Jewish Studies

A guide to help you navigate the Jewish Studies resources at IU Bloomington

About

Strengths of the Jewish Studies collection include Rabbinical literature and Biblical studies, Late antiquity, Jewish history, Zionism, Jewish philosophy and thought, Jewish Diaspora, Land of Israel history and geography, Holocaust- history, literature and personal narrative documentation and biography, Hebrew literature: Piyyutim, medieval and modern, Arab-Israeli conflict, Hebrew/Israeli language and culture. The Jewish Studies collections are complemented by strong collections in Slavic Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, History and Religion Studies, as well as by rare books and manuscripts in the collections of the Lilly Library.

The main catalog of books at Indiana University is IUCAT. Watch the video below if you need help finding e-books in IUCAT.

Search IUCAT:

If you are just starting a research project and need to know some basic information to get started, encyclopedias and historical dictionaries are great tools.

Most databases allow you click a box with a name like "scholarly articles," which does a reasonably good job of limiting your results to high-quality, academic articles.

Although IU has access to newspapers from around the world, most of our large collections of historical newspapers center on the United States. Check out the "Old News" link below for more non-American newspapers.

For most Jewish Studies research, at least through the undergraduate level, you can probably find plenty of sources right in Bloomington (or wherever you are, using your IUB login). In addition to all the physical collections at IU (including the Lilly Library and University Archives), many of which include collections related to Jewish life, IU has paid for access to online databases that include primary sources from all over the world and all periods of human history. Finally, libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions have digitized many of their collections and made them freely available. Contact me if you need help.

I also encourage you to look at the following guide put together by Alexis Hickey in Spring 2021: