Art historian Alexander Kantsedikas collected ephemera related to modern Jewish and world history throughout his life. He accumulated diverse materials on subjects including portrayals of historical events for the consumption of contemporary audiences, personal collections of cultural figures, and compilations of photography and documents where Jewish life was captured by unknown creators. Collection items include letters, postcards, photographs, leaflets, periodicals, books, documents, and diaries. 

COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

Psst...! 

Caran d'Ache (pen name of Emmanuel Poire) and Jean-Louis Forain founded the weekly anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard illustrated journal in February 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair began as a military scandal in 1894, when the General Staff of the French military wrongfully convicted the French Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus for selling military secrets to Germany. The incident divided France into two key camps: the Dreyfusards, who believed in Dreyfus’s innocence, and the anti-Dreyfusards, who did not. Both camps formed their own social clubs, newspapers, bookstores, publishing houses, and political parties. The anti-Dreyfusards, in particular, developed a socially-recognized language of rhetoric and images that advanced anti-Semitic thought in their publications. Caran d'Ache and Forain contributed to this campaign through Psst...!. For each edition, the illustrators produced on average four illustrations responding to developments in the Affair and denouncing a long list of anti-Dreyfusard enemies, including Jews, intellectuals, Germans, anarchists, Freemasons, Protestants, and magistrates. In response to Psst...!, the Dreyfusard camp created their own competing weekly illustrated journal, Le Sifflet. The two journals used visual imagery to promote their politics, creating a pictorial discourse between the two camps. Psst...! continued publication until September 1899, the time of Alfred Dreyfus's second conviction. 

David Schorr Archive 

Autographed music sheets, letters, photographs, and drawings connected to David Schorr—pianist, leader of the Zionist movement, and human rights activist. 

Letters and documents connected to Szymek Lustgarte, a member of Akiva and the Jewish underground in the Krakow Ghetto, prisoner at Montelupich Prison and Auschwitz, and member of Ha-Nokmim after the war.

Archival materials from teachers of Esperanto, including memos and correspondence.

Ilya Falkovich (1898-1979), a linguist and Yiddish scholar, authored several Yiddish-Russian dictionaries and articles for the Jewish Encyclopedia about the work of Soviet Jewish authors. The archive is comprised of hundreds of letters Falkovich received from Jewish authors after 1952, highlighting false and contradictory claims pertaining to the resurrection of Yiddish language literature