Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Collections & Reading Rooms > Dorot Jewish Division

Other Divisions

Because the Dorot Jewish Division lies within a vast general library organized into specialized divisions, material relevant to Jewish scholarship can also be found in other collections. For example, a scholar investigating the notorious Dreyfus affair would find several important volumes on the subject in the Dorot Jewish Division, but additional material would be found in the General Research Division, the Science, Industry and Business Library, and the Library's other specialized collections. This is one of the thousands of examples of the symbiosis that exists between the divisions of The New York Public Library.

In the Rare Books Division there are many fifteenth-century books on Jewish subjects which are not written in Hebrew. Here one finds the early Greek and Roman texts of Josephus and Philo and studies of the Kabbalah by Johannes Reuchlin. The Manuscripts and Archives Division holds a vast collection of relevant original source material supplementing the modest collection of Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts and archives housed by the Dorot Jewish Division. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center contains reference works and original research materials on Jewish dance, music, and other performing arts, although 300 manuscript plays collected by Boris Thomashefsky, a founder of Yiddish theatre in America, are in the Dorot Jewish Division.