•

"stuff' Several years in the making,
the encyclopedia relied on a world-
wide team of scholars, including
1,200 new contributors. Luckily, the
field of Jewish studies has experi-
enced exponential growth in recent
years.
"You're going to a man or woman
who has devoted his or her entire life
to a topic and you say, `Give me 500
words,"' Berenbaum says.
Those scholars pored over all the
entries — from Aachen to Zyrardow
— and updated 11,000 of them.
Overall, the new edition has more
entries covering Jewish life in the
Southern Hemisphere — Australia
and South America, for example.
And the sections on American Jewish
life and the Holocaust have been
strengthened.
The dilemmas Berenbaum and his
team faced about how to cover cer-
tain topics are almost talmudic. For
example, how do you describe Jewish
life in New York City? Their answer:
Give a portrait of several neighbor-
hoods, such as the historic German
Jewish neighborhood of Washington
Heights and the contemporary,
heavily Orthodox neighborhoods of
Williamsburg and Borough Park.
"We gave it a lot of flavor, some-
thing that the first encyclopedia was
much less interested in:' Berenbaum
says, though he's quick to praise the
editors of the first encyclopedia for
their prodigious efforts in the pre-
Internet era.
Also adding contemporary flavor to
the new edition are entries discussing
baseball player Shawn Green and the
recent popularization of Kabbalah.
Not surprisingly, Israel is the larg-
est single "entry," with an entire
volume devoted to the Jewish state.
Coming in second is the Holocaust.
Even entries on Holocaust-related
matters created more questions:
Should the noted Holocaust scholar
Deborah Lipstadt have her own entry,
or should her biography be part of
an entry about the highly publicized
2000 trial that Lipstadt won after
historian David Irving sued her in a
British court, claiming she defamed
him in a book by calling him a
Holocaust denier?
The decision? Berenbaum is cagey.
"Read the encyclopedia," he says.

-

Information about the new
Encyclopaedia Judaica is
available online at
www.encyclopaediajudaica.com .

The
Numbers

homsonGale, which
owns Macmillan
Reference USA, part-
nered with Keter Publishing
House on the second edition
of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
Thomson Gale is located in
Farmington Hills, Mich., and
is a publishing branch of the
Stamford-Conn.-based Thomson
Corporation, an information
solutions business with 40,000
employees that provides infor
mation and education services in
approximately 130 countries.

Here are some facts about
the second edition of the
Encyclopaedia Judaica:
• Total entries: 21,632.
• Total new entries: 2,664.
• Total entry words:
15,818,675.
• Total main body pages
(excluding index volume):
approximately 17,126.
• New bibliographical refer-
ences: 30,021.
• Longest entry: Israel, Land
and State, at around 600,000
words.
• Longest bibliography
Kabbalah.
• Most writers for a single
entry: Bible – the ancient bibli-
cal translations subsection had
11 writers, one for each language
(Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, etc.).

Many features make the 22
volumes of scholarship extreme-
ly accessible, including:
• Extensive cross-referencing
and a large subject index
• Place-name lists
• Lists of newspapers and
periodicals
• Illustrations and color
inserts, including more than 600
maps, charts and tables
• Entry-specific bibliographies
• An eight-page, full-color
insert in each volume, providing
a thematic illustration of the
many aspects-of Jewish life and
culture, as well as a record of
the physical development of the
State of Israel

- OA Staff

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