Governor Herbert H. Lehman today praised the newly-issued first volume of the ten-volume Universal Jewish Encyclopedia as “a vehicle of authoritative information concerning Judaism and the Jewish people” which would serve as “a potent instrument to allay the passions of bigotry and prejudice which are so rampant today in many parts of the world.”
Other volumes of the English-language encyclopedia, which has been in preparation for more than ten years, will be issued at short intervals. The initial volume, dedicated to the memory of George Alexander Kohut, covers the letter “A”, containing articles by more than 200 contributors, who are specialists in their fields and represent many parts of the world. The volume contains a total of 852 subjects and more than 400 illustrations.
The encyclopedia is being prepared by a board of editors including Rabbi Isaac Landman, editor-in-chief; Louis Rittenberg, executive and literary editors, and a large number of leading scholars, among them A.S.W. Rosenbach, William F. Albright, Julian Morgenstern, Louis L. Mann, Ismar Elbogen, Abraham A. Neumann, Joshua Bloch, Solomon B. Freehof, Leo Strauss, Louis Finkelstein, Maurice J. Karpf, Samuel S. Cohon, Rabbi Clifton H. Levy, Abraham Shinedling and Simon Cohen.
When completed the encyclopedia will contain thousands of articles on subjects never before included in such a work. It has 2,500 articles of America, more than 4,000 biographies and discussions of such subjects as American presidents and their relations to Jews, Aryanism, Birth Control, Anti-Jewish Canards, Partition of Palestine, Boycott, etc.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
