Jewish Studies
What is Jewish Studies?
Jewish studies focuses not only on the religion of Judaism, but on the many dimensions of Jewish culture, including literature, the Hebrew language, history, politics, social institutions, folkways, art, music, and film. The program encompasses 3,000 years of Jewish civilization and seeks to explore the religion, culture, and history of Jewish people. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary in orientation and scope. At Mount Holyoke, the study of Jewish culture draws on a wide variety of disciplines, including English, German, gender studies, history, international relations, and religion.
Left: American Jewish Congress records, undated, 1916-2006 (I-77), Center for Jewish History, NYC. Right: Close up of a Sefer Torah, photograph by Amber Taber, VCU Libraries, some rights reserved.
Multidisciplinary Databases
- Atla Religion Database This link opens in a new window
Journal articles, essays, papers, and some books on topics such as biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religion in social issues. Index with links to full text in many cases. Covers publications from 1949-present.
- RAMBI: Index of Articles on Jewish StudiesAn index of journal articles focused on Jewish Studies.
- Arts and Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
Bibliographic and citation information for journal articles in the arts and humanities from 1975-present. Part of the Web of Science Core Collection.
- Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including full text (PDFs) for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. Backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals and books in all subject areas, still images, moving images, audio, and primary sources. It now includes the contents of ArtStor.
- ProjectMUSE This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.
- Oxford Bibliography of Jewish Studies This link opens in a new window
Oxford Bibliographies Online give an overview of a topic, then an annotated bibliography of works on that topic. A great guide to use when starting your research or doing topic exploration.