NEVER AT A LOSS FOR WORDS
Ruth Beloff , THE JERUSALEM POST
The
project, funded by British benefactor Felix Posen, is dedicated to
listing every book, journal article and scholarly treatise on the
subject of anti-Semitism written in any language and published anywhere
in the world.
'I feel overwhelmed at times," says Susie
Cohen. Small wonder. As editor of the most comprehensive bibliography
of material about anti-Semitism in the world, it is surprising she
doesn't feel overwhelmed all the time.
But then again, she has been doing the job for 25 years.
Cohen
is the head of a special project at the Vidal Sassoon International
Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University, Givat Ram
Campus, established by Prof. Yehuda Bauer in 1982. Since 2002 the
director of the center and academic adviser of the project has been
Robert S. Wistrich, who holds the Neuberger Chair in Modern Jewish
History at the Hebrew University. He is a world-renowned expert in the
field of anti-Semitism.
The project, funded by British benefactor
Felix Posen, is dedicated to listing every book, journal article and
scholarly treatise on the subject of anti-Semitism written in any
language and published anywhere in the world. This does not include
films, fiction or newspaper articles.
The entries consist of the
standard bibliographic information (title, author, publisher, date), as
well as an explicit synopsis of the thrust of the book or article. No
other bibliography in the field of Judaica includes such an elaborative
element, says Cohen.
Her job is to find the material and, with a
staff of eight abstractors working under her direction, check the
synopses for factual accuracy and edit any errors in grammar and syntax.
There is new material that comes in every day, says Cohen, so they have their hands full all the time.
But, she says, they all love their work.
"It
is so interesting," she adds. "We learn something new every day. We
read new books all the time. And no one ever quits their job."
It is such intriguing work, "they don't want to leave," she marvels.
The
material Cohen works with comprises anything written about
anti-Semitism - but not the anti-Semitic vitriol itself. Thus books
about the Holocaust, anti-Semitic events (such as the Dreyfus case) or
anti-Zionist sentiment in the Arab world are all grist for her mill.
Spanning millennia, the bibliography covers works on subjects dating
back to what Cohen says is the first written reference to
anti-Semitism: Haman in Persia circa 500 BCE. They add about 1,500 new
entries a year.
Targeted mainly for scholars, historians and
researchers, the bibliography is an invaluable resource, says Cohen.
The synopses give scholars or students the opportunity to grasp the
essence of a book or article at a glance without having to wade through
all that material themselves. Or, based on the abstract, they can
determine whether a particular publication is one they want to read in
its entirety.
Cohen, who made aliya from New York in 1963, received
her certification as a librarian from the Hebrew University. She then
worked in the bibliography department of the National Library on the
Givat Ram campus.
When the Vidal Sassoon Center came up with the concept for the bibliography in 1983, she was asked to head the project.
So
what is a typical day in the life of the chief bibliographer? From her
office in the basement of the Popick Building at Givat Ram, Cohen walks
over to the National Library twice a week to select material, which is
put aside for her to look at. She then returns to her office and inputs
the appropriate publication information for each of her staff members.
They access the books or articles from the library and get to work
reading the material and writing the abstracts directly online. Once
they are completed, Cohen reads through the synopses and edits them.
The
bulk of the material is in German and English, says Cohen. The rest is
in Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian and other
European languages.
Therefore, Cohen's staff is a multilingual
melange of abstractors. They read articles in their entirety. As for
the books, they scan them for theme and content by reading the preface
and table of contents and leafing through the chapters. Thus a book can
be summarized within an hour or two, says Cohen.
She reads each new
abstract on line, book or article in hand, going over every detail. She
corrects the English, checks the dates, verifies the historical facts
and judges whether the gist of what the author wants to say has been
conveyed accurately.
How can she tell whether the information is
accurate if the book is in a foreign language? For one thing, she
understands English, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Spanish, Italian,
Russian, Polish and Czech. "I can scan a page in any of those languages
and get an idea of what it's about," she says. As for the details of
the data, "I've been working at it for 25 years," says Cohen. "I have
learned a lot of Jewish history."
The subject of anti-Semitism
appears in many disciplines, Cohen explains. It comes up in history,
literature, the arts. But people didn't know how to go about finding
such references, so this compendium is a boon to any scholar, she says.
In
addition to the on-line access, a hard-copy volume of the bibliography
with selected entries is published once a year by the K.G. Saur
publishing company in Munich, prepared by computer expert Sara Grosvald
in the Givat Ram office.
"We are presenting historical data and helping scholars and students to do the research and learn history," states Cohen.
She
says thousands of people use the bibliography. With all its 50,000
entries on line, the Web site (sicsa.huji.ac.il) receives hundreds of
hits a day. "If you Google 'antisemitism' plus 'bibliography,' ours is
one of the first sites to come up," she say proudly.
With such a wealth of experience behind her and a vast amount of work still ahead, Cohen says, "I don't ever want to retire."
This article appeared in The Jerusalem Post on December 4, 2008. It is reprinted here with the permission of the writer.
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