Contact: Johanna Ramos-Boyer
703-646-5137
johanna@jrbpr.biz
“The Posen Library’s digital platform (PDL) makes accessible little-known documents of the Jewish past that add enormously to the effectiveness of the classroom. Via a user-friendly website, professors and students can analyze the intimate letters between an early modern Jewish husband and wife, probe the meanings of a blessing warning of Jewish heresy, and investigate the life of a medieval midwife through her diary, among many other gems. The Posen Library opens a world of Jewish creativity.”
—NANCY SINKOFF, Professor of Jewish History at Rutgers University
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Launches Posen Teaching Clips for Educators
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization has launched the Posen Library Teaching Clips project at https://www.posenlibrary.com/teachingclips. Professors, teaching assistants and educators are always looking for new ways to stimulate classroom discussion. Videos can be especially effective in introducing a new voice to students and enlivening classroom discussion. Posen Teaching Clips bring renown scholars to your classroom. They are FREE and easy to use with instructions on the website to insert these clips into classroom presentations.
The Posen Library Teaching Clips are 3- to 5-minute videos featuring an esteemed scholar of Jewish studies discussing aspects of Jewish culture or history. Available now, free for any educator to use in lectures or classes, are Teaching Clips on Gender Studies, Secular Jews, Religious and Spiritual Culture, Reading Biblical Literature, Modern Jewish History, and Jewish Visual Cultures.
These short clips feature Jewish studies scholars Elisheva Carlebach, Todd M. Endelman, Zvi Gitelman, and Deborah Dash Moore. Excerpted from longer Posen Library events, most of the video clips use striking visual works to address a larger theme.
Some examples include:
Religious and Spiritual Culture: A photo of a melamed (teacher of children) instructing young boys in religious texts in a heder (Hebrew school) in Lublin, Poland in the 1920s leads to a discussion of the impact of secularization on Jewish culture.
Gender Studies: Several of the clips illustrate how women changed Jewish life and culture starting in the nineteenth century—some as religious leaders, others as artists creating such works as Charlotte von Rothschild’s glorious Haggadah in German Translation.
Jewish Visual Cultures: A close look at an 1878 painting of Jews Praying in the Synagogue by Maurycy Gottlieb reveals a surprising amount of lively activity in the women’s gallery.
Thousands of other images and reading selections relevant to your classes are available for free on the Posen Digital Library at posenlibrary.com. Registration is free, easy, and takes just a few minutes.
To keep up with everything The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is doing, please: sign up for The Posen Library bi-monthly newsletter or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
About the Posen Library
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization consists of The Posen Digital Library (PDL), available at posenlibrary.com, and the 10-volume print anthology of Jewish culture published by Yale University Press. The Posen Library is a collection curated by leading Jewish Studies scholars offering unprecedented access to thousands of primary sources reflecting Jewish creativity, diversity, and culture worldwide, spanning biblical times to the twenty-first century. Many of these original sources are works translated into English for the first time.
The Posen Digital Library (PDL) currently includes 2,400 primary sources—including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, fiction, poetry, literature, cartoons, prayer book passages, first-person accounts, and so much more. As each print volume of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization anthology is released, the entire collection will ultimately grow to more than 6,500 sources, approximately 90 percent of which will be available to a worldwide audience through the PDL.
