General Collection
The American Jewish Historical Society general library collection 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 intellectual, political and economic life; Jewish participation in the visual and performing arts; the geographic origins of American Jewry; Jewish immigration to North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean; gender relations and family structure in American Jewish life; anti-Semitism; regional and local histories; and Zionism. The library supports the archival collections.
Milton Gottesman 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 in the Americas.
The Soble collection of rare books contains nearly 400 titles of 18th and 19th-century American imprints relating to the American Jewish experience.
Please be aware that AJHS collections are non-circulating, and all materials are to be used on-site. Interlibrary Loan requests may be honored in certain circumstances. Please contact info@ajhs.org with any ILL inquiries.
The AJHS library located within the Center for Jewish History in New York City also has an open-stack reference collection in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room that researchers are welcome to browse. The collections consist of encyclopedias, yearbooks, genealogical reference sources, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, atlases, and many other useful American Jewish reference publications. These reference works are integrated 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.
