Jewish Studies

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

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.