More Friday thoughts - book titles

I came across a fun website sorted books) which highlighted the "Sorted books" project. People arranged books so that their titles read as a sentence or conversation.

I thought it would be fun to pull some HUC titles to do the same. Feel free to send in your own "sortings"

Friday silliness - thesis

Yasher koach to everyone who just turned in their thesis!



My advisor speaks and says to me "Arise my student, my bleary-eyed one and come away [from your computer]
For behold, the thesis is passed, the pain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of placement has come, and the voice of your beshert congregation is heard in our land.

I'm Still in Cyberspace

I know that my huge fan base out there is wondering where have all those helpful weekly reviews gone to. Did she stop reading, you ask? Did the library stop buying periodicals? Is she overworked? Underpaid? Lost in space?
Well, the last assumption is probably closest to the truth - I have strayed to a different virtual path, and have found enlightenment! ok, not exactly, but close. I have been dabbling with facebook to see if communication between you and us could become a two way street, so to speak. So I created a personal profile (which helped me enormously with family members in Israel, and long lost friends), I created a discussion group for my Literature of Resistance class (comatose, for the time being), and encouraged Sheryl to create the Frances-Henry Library group. And this is where you can help us decide if social networking can be applied to useful and fun filled exchanges between you as users, and us as service providers. Joining the group entails having an account with facebook.com, and you can do that with minimally required information. So go ahead, log on, sign up & become a fan. Let us know if it works for you.
And I will get back to occasional reviews, I promise.
yaffa

Librarian as Witness - Seven: Emil Fackenheim and the J.I.R.

We just received a copy of Emil Fackenheim's memoirs, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

Fackenheim (1916-2002), a major Jewish thinker and philosopher in the last half of the twentieth century, was barely able to escape from Nazi Germany by the skin of his teeth.

With typical Germanic Tuechtigkeit [thoroughness] Dr. Fackenheim appeared to have saved every scrap of paper, for the book contains many interesting facsimiles of numerous documents and letters.

One of them, on [unnumbered] page 268, is a letter dated January 20, 1939 from Henry Slonimsky (1884-1970), Dean of the Jewish Institute of Religion, informing him of his appointment as "assistant librarian."

Both Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion (at that time two separate institutions) did their best to rescue as many scholars as they could from Nazi Germany.

But extraordinary visas to the United States were granted only to clergy. So while Dr. Slonimsky's letter got him out of a concentration camp, Fackenheim was not technically a rabbi, and so was precluded from coming to take this position in New York.

Shalom Spiegel (1899-1984) was Librarian at the J.I.R. at the time, with Rabbi I. Edward Kiev (1905-1970) as Assistant Librarian. It would be a few more years that Dr. Spiegel left the J.I.R. to become a professor uptown at the Jewish Theological Seminary and that Rabbi Kiev became Librarian.

The J.I.R. clearly did not need two assistant librarians, so this offer of a position must be seen as a bold effort, as an act of rahmanut, to save a life.

I had no idea that the Jewish Institute of religion ever figured in Emil Fackenheim's life, but at least Dr. Slonimsky's letter afforded his release from imprisonment.

I am sooooo 2.0

Well, I've taken the leap (or the dive) into the pixelated world of Facebook. For those of you who are already Face-bookies, "friend" me! or check out the library page at
Frances-Henry-Library-HUC-JIR/8128593918
I'm hoping that this will be another way to make library announcements, give research tips, post book reviews, and links to good and/or fun stuff.

If you are not familiar with Facebook, this is one of the new-fangled social spaces. You can set up personal pages to post messages, pictures, videos, etc. You can also send pictures, graphics and much more to your friends. Not to mention the vibrating singing hamster - my favorite!

And what's 2.0 you ask? Web 2.0, and more specifically Library 2.0, is the notion that libraries and web services should be more interactive and user-friendly. While this has always been our goal in our face-to-face interactions, we're still trying to figure out the best way(s) to do this electronically. Its also a official sounding way of saying to want to try out all the new tools we can. (we blog! we wiki! we Facebook! we go cross-eyed staring at computer screens!)