Jewish Studies

This guide was created by Rachel Ariel, former Librarian for Jewish Studies, who retired on July 31, 2025.

Our gratitude to Rachel Ariel, our beloved Judaica Librarian, who retired in July 2025.    As a subject specialist for Judaica and Hebraica, Rachel selected all types of materials for the library: print, electronic and visual. She collected materials from and about Israel, as well as from many other parts of the world, in Hebrew and in other languages. A member of the Association of Jewish Libraries, Rachel has served as a liaison to the Center for Jewish Studies and provided specialized reference assistance, research consultations and instruction to library users.

Heidi Madden now serves as a Liaison to Jewish Studies. Please send your requests for tours, orientations, purchase requests, and instruction requests  to heidi.madden@duke.edu.

Access through Duke Library

Open Access

When searching Duke's catalog for Hebrew or Yiddish-language materials, here are several helpful methods:

• Searching using romanized terms:
  • This method will theoretically retrieve the most results.
  • When using this method, follow the romanization table provided by the Library of Congress
• Searching in Hebrew characters
  • This method may not retrieve all relevant results, but will likely return some different results than a romanized search term
• Searching under author's name (Last name, first name)
  • This is a good method to employ to pull in the most complete results when the author's name is known.