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Online Catalog

The American Jewish Historical Society library consists of approximately 50,000 volumes, including both books and serials (journals and periodicals). Some of the major topics represented in the library collection are American Jewish religious, intellectual, political and economic life; Jewish participation in the visual and performing arts; the geographic origins of American Jewry; Jewish immigration to the Americas; gender relations and family structure in American Jewish life; anti-Semitism; regional and local histories; and Zionism.

Milton Gottesman Rare Book Collections

AJHS has two rare book collections. The A.S.W. Rosenbach collection of American Judaica includes over 350 books and pamphlets published in America before 1850 that relate to Jews or their experiences on the continent. The Soble collection of rare books contains nearly 400 titles of 18^th and 19^th-century American imprints relating to the American Jewish experience.

Please be aware that all materials are to be used on-site and cannot be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan. AJHS collections are non-circulating.

AJHS libraries in Boston, Massachusetts and New York have open-stack reference collections in their Reading Rooms that researchers are welcome to browse. The collections consist of encyclopedias, yearbooks, genealogical reference sources, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, atlases, finding aids to AJHS archival collections, and many other useful American Jewish reference publications.

AJHS in New York has integrated its reference works with the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute, American Sephardi Federation, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the Reading Room of the Center for Jewish History. This combined reference collection consists of approximately 3,000 volumes and includes important resources for research on American, Sephardic, Eastern European and German Jewry. Click here for our reading room hours.