Zachary, Yashar Koah on the award. Loved reading your bio. So rich and exciting.
Wishing you and the AJL community a healthy and somewhat happy Pesah. Naomi Steinberger JTS Library ________________________________ From: Hasafran <hasafran-bounces+nsteinberger=jtsa....@lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Dina Herbert via Hasafran <hasafran@lists.osu.edu> Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2020 11:28 PM To: Zachary M Baker <zba...@stanford.edu> Cc: Hasafran <hasaf...@lists.service.ohio-state.edu> Subject: Re: [ha-Safran] Fanny Goldstein Merit Award I echo everyone's sentiments for Zachary. I'm so disappointed we aren't able to present it to him in person this year. This is a career to be jealous of and obviously Zachary you fully deserve this award. My thanks to Elliot and the rest of the committee. Dina Dina Herbert President, Association of Jewish Libraries: The Leading Authority on Judaic Librarianship https://jewishlibraries.org/ On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 6:39 PM Zachary M Baker via Hasafran <hasafran@lists.osu.edu<mailto:hasafran@lists.osu.edu>> wrote: Dear Colleagues, I had hoped to join you at this year’s AJL Conference in Evanston, which for understandable reasons has been canceled along with so many other activities and functions. With Passover imminently upon us, here we all are, sheltering in place, hoping that this frightful pandemic will soon pass. When Elliot Gertel called to inform me that I am the recipient of the Fanny Goldstein Merit Award, I was deeply touched — and I am very grateful to AJL and to the committee members for the recognition. In a subsequent e-mail exchange, Elliot asked me to send him a few paragraphs that might summarize my career highlights, for inclusion in the conference program book. In the end, I sent him a couple of versions: one long and one short. Presumptuously and with apologies, I am sharing the long version of my career summary. Please feel free to jump to the next e-mail in your in-box! My first paid library job was during the year following my college graduation (1972), when I worked as a clerk in the reference department of the Hennepin County Library, which then served suburban Minneapolis (now HCL covers both the city and its suburbs). HCL in those days was one of the most innovative public library systems in the U.S. Its visionary adirector, Robert Rohlf, hired Maurice (Mitch) Freedman as head of Technical Services; Mitch, in turn, brought in Sanford (Sandy) Berman as the library’s Head Cataloger, after Sandy and his family were ejected from Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972. One of the librarians with whom I worked in County Reference was Rosalind (Roz) Reisner, who is now an active member of AJL. I put in a second stint at HCL, working my way through library school at the University of Minnesota (1974-75). As I neared the end of my studies I wondered what I might do next. A few months before graduation I received a brochure from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, announcing course offerings for its academic unit, the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. One listing particularly caught my eye: Internship in Judaica Librarianship, co-taught by Dina Abramowicz and Bella Hass Weinberg. I showed the brochure to Sandy Berman, who encouraged me to enroll in the internship program — and to inquire about job prospects at YIVO for an entry-level librarian. In January 1976 I began the internship and the following June was hired as assistant librarian, to catalog Yiddish books in the YIVO Library’s Vilna collection. It was during my first stint at YIVO (1976-1981) that the genealogical craze, spurred by the TV series “Roots,” really took off. In that pre-internet era, with access to Soviet and East European archives still largely cut off, specialized institutions such as YIVO were important for family history research. Dina Abramowicz asked me to attend a meeting of the nascent Jewish Genealogical Society in late 1977 and when I reported back to her the following morning, she duly delegated the responsibility for genealogical reference service to me. I began to write for Toledot: the Journal of Jewish Genealogy, whose editors, Arthur Kurzweil and Steven W. Siegel, encouraged me to update David Bass's bibliography of Eastern European Jewish memorial books (yizker-bikher), which had been published in Yad Vashem Studies. I followed suit, and that bibliography went through several iterations —including its being included in the two editions of the anthology From a Ruined Garden, edited by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (1983 and 1998). It was while I was working at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal (1981-1987) that our Association’s flagship journal, Judaica Librarianship, was launched. Bella Hass Weinberg (founding co-editor, with Marcia Posner) solicited my participation as the journal’s “Responsa” columnist. Thus began my longstanding connection with the journal, as Contributing Editor, Style Editor, and (eventually) Editor-in-Chief. Not long after I returned to YIVO in 1987 as Head Librarian, Bella and I began to edit the Yiddish Catalog and Authority File of the YIVO Library, which was published by G. K. Hall, in 5 volumes, in 1990. We anticipated that the eventual retrospective conversion of the Library’s catalog would not entirely supersede this facsimile of the Library’s Yiddish card catalog. Of my other publications during that period I take special pride in “The Case of the Soviet Sholem Aleichem: A Bibliographic Detective Story,” which was published in The Book Peddler (as the Yiddish Book Center’s magazine was then called) and subsequently, in expanded form, in the YIVO Annual, where it bore the title "Sholem Aleichem's 80th Birthday Observances and the Cultural Mobilization of Soviet Jewry: A Case Study.” I am also proud of the collaborative work that the YIVO Library and the Yiddish Book Center did together during those years. Perhaps the most important example of that collaboration was the fact-finding trip that Neil Zagorin, on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center, and I made to Buenos Aires in November 1994, in the wake of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community building. The New York YIVO’s sister organization, Fundación IWO, had its headquarters in the AMIA building, and much of its library and archival collections were damaged or destroyed as a result of the bombing. Being guided through the ruins firsthand was one of the most powerfully moving experiences I have ever had. My time as YIVO’s Head Librarian coincided with my most active involvement in the Association of Jewish Libraries, when I served on its Council and Board in several capacities, including as AJL’s President (1994-1996). Subsequently, I served as President of AJL’s sister organization, the Council of Archives and Research Libraries in Jewish Studies - CARLJS (1998-2002), whose annual meetings took place at AJL’s conferences. And it was during those same years that I traveled to Kiev as part of a YIVO delegation (early 1992), to visit the Vernadsky Library just at the moment that its incredible collections of Judaica were being opened. In early 1997 I was part of a survey team commissioned by the Foundation for Jewish Culture to document the National Library of Lithuania’s Judaica holdings, in Vilnius, and explore possible avenues of cooperation with that library. The other members of the team were Herbert Zafren and Pearl Berger. Although I have always considered myself a “research librarian,” in was only during the later phase of my career that I worked in a university setting, namely, Stanford. I soon came to appreciate just what a privilege it is to be a subject specialist in a great university library. At Stanford, I was able to work on several notable acquisitions, including the Ira Nowinski photograph archive, the Samson-Copenhagen Judaica Collection, the Eliasaf Robinson Collection on Tel-Aviv, and born-digital portions of Amos Gitai’s film archive. While at Stanford, I edited two book-length publications, Judaica in the Slavic Realm, Slavica in the Judaic Realm: Repositories, Collections, Projects, Publications (Haworth Information Press, 2003), and Ira Nowinski: The Photographer As Witness (Stanford University Libraries, 2004), and — somewhat belatedly — produced The Lawrence Marwick Collection of Copyrighted Yiddish Plays: An Annotated Bibliography<https://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/marwick/marwickbibliography.pdf> (Library of Congress, 2004). My collaboration with the Yiddish Book Center continued as well, in connection with its 1000 Essential Yiddish Books<https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/digital-yiddish-library/1000-essential-yiddish-books> website (2006). These last two publications, like my “Resources in Yiddish Studies” research guide (In geveb<https://ingeveb.org/>, 2017), were online-only. I think that it was a combination of just showing up every year (and occasionally giving a paper or chairing a panel) and also being affiliated with Stanford University, that led to my serving on the Board of Directors of the Association for Jewish Studies for ten years (2007-2017), including four years on its Executive Board, as Secretary-Treasurer (2013-2017). I feel that my serving on the AJS Board represented recognition by the field's leading learned society, of the value that librarians and archivists contribute to Jewish Studies scholarship. From 2010 to 2017 I was privileged to serve as Stanford’s Assistant University Librarian for Collection Development (Humanities and Social Sciences). For me, the pain of having to submit and defend annual budget proposals was more than outbalanced by the opportunity to work with and learn from an incredible team of subject librarians, whose passion and devotion to their areas of specialization was every bit as intense as mine was (and remains), to the Jewish Studies field. Since retiring in early 2018, I have pursued a multi-pronged — and very enjoyable — research project in an area of particular interest: the history of the Yiddish theater in South America, especially Argentina. You can find some of my “findings” on the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project<https://web.uwm.edu/yiddish-stage/>’s website. חג שמח — Happy Passover! Zachary Zachary M. Baker zba...@stanford.edu<mailto:zba...@stanford.edu> zekhar...@gmail.com<mailto:zekhar...@gmail.com> __ Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) ================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: hasaf...@lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:hasaf...@lists.service.ohio-state.edu> To join Ha-Safran, update or change your subscription, etc. - click here: https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/hasafran Questions, problems, complaints, compliments send to: galro...@osu.edu<mailto:galro...@osu.edu> Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.service.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html Earlier Listserver: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org -- Hasafran mailing list Hasafran@lists.osu.edu<mailto:Hasafran@lists.osu.edu> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/hasafran -- Dina Herbert dina.herb...@gmail.com<mailto:dina.herb...@gmail.com>
__ Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) ================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: hasaf...@lists.service.ohio-state.edu To join Ha-Safran, update or change your subscription, etc. - click here: https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/hasafran Questions, problems, complaints, compliments send to: galro...@osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.service.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html Earlier Listserver: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org -- Hasafran mailing list Hasafran@lists.osu.edu https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/hasafran
