new york | The editors of the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s new edition confronted a whole new world.
In the more than 30 years since the first edition was published, Jewish life has been revitalized in the former communist world, Las Vegas and Atlanta have become fast-growing Jewish communities and women have taken a much more active role in Jewish life — and their contributions have been increasingly recognized.
“The original edition did not take into account that 50 percent of Jews are women,” said Judith Baskin, director of the Jewish studies program at the University of Oregon and the encyclopedia’s assistant editor for women and gender.
The new edition, the encyclopedia’s second, attempts to rectify that with more than 300 new entries on Jewish women, including entries on well-known figures such as former U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.), and on lesser-known women like Asenath Barzani, an Iraqi woman trained by her father in the 1600s as a Torah scholar.
These are among roughly 2,700 new entries in the new edition, to be published Dec. 8 by Macmillan Reference USA and Israel’s Keter Publishing. The 22 volumes contain more than 21,000 entries on Jewish life, and will cost $1,995. A licensed online version also will be available.
The comprehensiveness offered by the collection is not available in any one source, says Jay Flynn, a publisher with Thomson Gale, which owns Macmillan Reference USA.
“Certainly you can go out and find a biography of Billy Crystal and you can read it. What we’re really trying to deliver” is accessibility and authority, Flynn says.
It took a lot of effort to create that comprehensiveness. Several years in the making, the encyclopedia relied on a worldwide team of scholars, including some 1,200 new contributors.
The new edition has more entries covering Jewish life in the Southern Hemisphere, and the sections on American Jewish life and the Holocaust have been strengthened.
The dilemmas Michael Berenbaum, the encyclopedia’s executive editor, and his team faced about how to cover certain topics are well, almost, talmudic. For example, how do you describe Jewish life in New York City? Their answer: Give a portrait of several neighborhoods, such as the historic German Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights and the contemporary Orthodox neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park.
“We gave it a lot of flavor, something that the first encyclopedia was much less interested in,” Berenbaum says, though he’s quick to praise the editors of the first encyclopedia for their prodigious efforts in the pre-Internet era.
Also adding contemporary flavor are entries on baseball player Shawn Green and the popularization of Kabbalah.
Not surprisingly, Israel is the largest single entry, with an entire volume devoted to the Jewish state. Coming in second is the Holocaust.
Even entries on Holocaust-related matters created more questions: Should noted Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt have her own entry, or should her biography be part of an entry about the 2000 trial that Lipstadt won after historian David Irving sued her, claiming she defamed him in a book by calling him a Holocaust denier?
The decision? Berenbaum is cagey.
“Read the encyclopedia,” he says.
More information about the new Encyclopaedia Judaica is available at www.encyclopaediajudaica.com.
Behind the numbers on Encyclopaedia Judaica
Here are some key facts about the second edition of the Jewish Encyclopaedia:
• Total entries: 21,632.
• Total new entries: 2,664.
• Total entry words: 15,818,675.
• Total main body pages (excluding index volume): approximately 17,126.
• New bibliographical references: 30,021.
• Longest entry: Israel, Land and State, at around 600,000 words.
• Longest bibliography: Kabbalah.
• Most writers for a single entry: Bible — the ancient biblical translations subsection had 11 writers, one for each language (Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, etc.).