Jewish Studies Resources: Primary Sources

Digitized slides of concentration camps and other historic sites, taken by MSU Landscape Architecture Professor Duane Mezga in 1992.

Extensive digital library of Jewish texts, translations, commentaries, and reference works..

Articles from the JTA news agency from 1923-

institutional records of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee since its founding in 1914

Whole life story interviews ("Biographies") with 1200 elderly Jews in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, conducted between 2000-2009. 700 interviews translated into English. Searchable photos and other documents. Films, podcasts, and thematic websites.

Explores Jewish life in Eastern Europe during and after World War II. The archive consists of nearly 400 interviews, conducted primarily in Yiddish, and mostly in small towns throughout Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. The videos are captioned with English translations.

Over 700 interviews, 1 to 2 hours in length. The interviews are focused life histories, covering family background, involvement with Yiddish language and culture, Jewish identity, and the transmission of culture and values across generations and communities. In English or Yiddish (with English subtitles).

Passover haggadot published in the US and Israel from the 1920s-2000s. Available in the MSU Libraries Special Collections.

Irwin T. Holtzman's files relating to his Israeli literature collection, primarily from the decades between 1970 and 2010. Items located in MSU Libraries Special Collections.

Includes the Arsenal Collection of far-right and antisemitic materials, as well as American Communist, labor, and other left and alternative movements.

Personal and professional papers of the American Jewish writer Lev Raphael, known for writing about the gay Jewish experience and experience as a child of Holocaust survivors. The bulk of the material dates from 1983-2011.

Translations of Israeli newspaper articles by human rights activist Israel Shahak, published monthly in "From the Hebrew Press" through the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 1991-1993.