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IDA COHEN SELAVAN
A Survey of Bibliographies ofJewish
Interest, 1980-1990
t h e
d r a m a t i c
in c r e a s e
o f interest in Jewish Studies in the Unit
ed States and Canada which occurred in the sixties rose to a
peak du ring the decade o f the seventies. Jewish studies p ro
grams and departm en ts proliferated in colleges and universi
ties, as did programs for study in Israel. Although the rate o f
growth decreased du ring the eighties, some programs became
full fledged departm en ts and offered graduate degrees. Stu
dents wrote theses on various areas o f Jewish interest and pub
lished articles in journals. Many theses were subsequently pub
lished as monographs.
Along with these new writers, established scholars continued
to do research and publish. Some areas o f Jewish interest, not
well documented in the seventies, became popu lar in the
eighties, e.g., genealogy, Sephardic studies, women, Black-
Jewish relations, and bio-ethics. The greatest area o f growth
was in books and articles on the Holocaust, on both scholarly
and popu lar levels, especially those geared to educational set
tings.
It is not only scholars who read books o f Jewish interest. Jews
buy more books pe r capita than any o ther ethnic group , and
publishers have begun to recognize this fact. University presses
and trade publishers have jo ined the specialized Jewish pub
lishing houses in producing hund reds o f books o f Jewish in
terest, fiction and non-fiction, adult and juvenile, in the past
decade.
Bibliographies o f books in areas o f Jewish interest have been
published for many decades, bu t the decade o f the eighties was
one o f unp receden ted flowering, due largely to the new tech
nology. Many o f these bibliographies were composed on and
processed and p rin ted by computers. The typography in these