The Sydney Taylor Book Award at Fifty: Trends in Canonized Jewish Children’s Literature (1968–2020)

The Sydney Taylor Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries since 1968, is the only book award for children’s literature that represents the Jewish experience. The award’s fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 2018, provided an opportunity to conduct a content analysis study of 102 books and summarize thematic and publishing trends across award categories and time periods. The data points collected were based on bibliographic records and, to smaller extent, on coded Holocaust-related themes. Conclusions refer to Jewish education in the United States and concepts of gender, identity, history, and Holocaust studies that have shaped it through children’s literature for over fifty years.

The Cultural Doings and Undoings of the Sydney Taylor Book Award

The children’s book award is an ideological vehicle that communicates both implicit and explicit values to the wider world. For half a century, the Sydney Taylor Book Award has invoked criteria of literary excellence and authentic portrayals of Jewish experiences and the implicit cultural values that underpin them in its mission to recognize, celebrate, and perpetuate quality Jewish children’s literature. The award upholds and subverts cultural ideas of childhood, literary excellence, and Jewish authenticity in order to resist systems of power and dominant cultural narratives that seek to erase or flatten Jewish representation.

The UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative: Finding the Keys to an Untold History

This essay introduces the scope and aim of the Sephardic Archive Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. In conjunction with the Library, Special Collections, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, this project seeks to locate, collect, archive, and share documents and ephemera relating to Sephardic history. With a focus on their journeys to Los Angeles and Southern California, the initiative aims to tell the stories of Jews from North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. The transnational ties of Sephardic commercial, intellectual, religious, social, and family networks have produced a richly tangled web of history, which for the past century has found a thriving base in Los Angeles. The project seeks to create a hub of scholarly and communal investment, interest, and exploration of materials related to the Sephardic past.

The Victor Perera Papers

The author shares the circumstances that led to his encounter with the personal archives of Victor Haim Perera (1934–2003), an award-winning Sephardic-American writer, journalist, environmental and political activist, and academic born in Guatemala City. Perera published six books on topics as varied as Sephardic history, the Maya Indians, and the Loch Ness monster, and contributed dozens of articles, short stories, and essays to newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and literary anthologies. This paper also provides an overview of Perera’s life and work and shares information about the Victor Perera Papers collection at the University of Michigan Library. It presents a case study illustrating that library catalogers can improve discoverability of and access to library special collections by expanding beyond their core duties and investigating the contexts behind the materials that cross their desks. The article ends with a preliminary bibliography of Perera’s works.