The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 10: 1973-2005
*Starred Review* Working internationally to advance Jewish education and promote Jewish culture in the public sphere, the Posen Foundation supports scholarship in the area of modern Jewish history and culture. Yale University Press has collaborated with the Posen Foundation for what is projected to be a 10-volume series, billed as a treasury of 3,000 years of Jewish creative works from around the world. The first volume released in the series is Volume Ten, 1973–2005        In this two-part volume, readers will find more than 800 examples of the many expressive forms of Jewish culture that flourished during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century. Texts across a number of cultural areas are anthologized. Readers seeking primary texts, documents, images, and artifacts constituting Jewish culture and civilization will not be disappointed. More important, they might even be inspired.  A lengthy introduction provides a thorough examination of the volume. The work is organized by genre: “Literature,” “Visual Culture,” “Popular Culture,” “Intellectual Culture,” and “Spiritual Culture.” Those sections are further broken down—for example, “Literature” is then divided by “Fiction,” “Poetry,” “Memoir,” “Children’s and Young Adult’s Literature,” and “Drama.” Subsections are then further divided by year (in this volume, from 1973 to 2005) and, finally, alphabetically by author within each year. Most selections begin with a brief biography of the author, followed by the selected text itself. Entries close with a bibliography for further reading. The section on “Visual Culture” includes color photographs of art, architecture, and artifacts. Items that cannot be anthologized (films, choreography, musical selections) are listed at the end of the volume.   Academic librarians in particular understand that “Jewish studies” represents an incredibly broad chronological and disciplinary range. They are also aware that Jewish studies are inherently interdisciplinary. In providing an assortment of both popular and scholarly Jewish texts that represent Jewish culture and civilization, this work goes beyond an academic scope and ensures its relevance to public as well as academic librarians. The editors describe their work as “an unprecedented attempt to gather, in a single, usable collection, what the current generation of scholars agrees best represents Jewish culture and civilization in its historical and global entirety. And based on this initial volume, they have done a fine job, indeed. This set will serve to improve teaching and research in Jewish studies at institutions of higher learning and, at the same time, promote, maintain, and improve understanding of the Jewish population and Judaism in general. Recommended for most academic, synagogue, and public libraries, where it will make a good companion to the Encyclopaedia Judaica (2006). --Sarah Watstein