Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies


The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania—commonly called the Katz Center—is a postdoctoral research center devoted to the study of Jewish history and civilization.

History

The Katz Center is the continuation of two pioneering institutions devoted to advanced research: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning and the Annenberg Research Institute. Dropsie College was the first accredited doctoral program in Judaic Studies in the world. The Annenberg Research Institute was a center for advanced study in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam founded in 1986 with staff and collections carried over from Dropsie College. The founding Director of the Katz Center was David B. Ruderman. The current Ella Darivoff Director is Stephen P. Weitzman.
The Katz Center was established in 1993 as a part of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. It was first named the Center for Judaic Studies ; later, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies —and in 2008, the Katz family endowed the Center in memory of former Board chair and philanthropist Herbert D. Katz. It is located in an award winning building across from Independence National Historical Park in Center City Philadelphia.
The Katz Center houses offices for scholars who are in residence throughout the academic year for postdoctoral research, as well as an extensive library of Judaica, a reading room, and seminar and meeting spaces.

Fellowship Program

The Katz Center's primary activity is an academic fellowship program, which brings scholars from around the world to Philadelphia for a semester or a year. The program supports approximately 20 fellows each year; scholars apply if their current research fits the annual theme.
Weekly seminars allow fellows to share their findings with each other and with invited scholarly guests; annual conferences are open to the wider academic community.
In addition, the Katz Center offers public programs and a summer intensive course for graduate students.

Library at the Katz Center

The combination of the Dropsie/Annenberg library with the Judaica holdings of the Penn Libraries resulted in a 350,000-volume collection of Judaica, including more than 8,000 rare books and an assortment of cuneiform tablets.
There are also 451 codices in eleven alphabets and 24 languages and dialects. Some of the languages and dialects represented include Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, Latin, Judeo-Arabic, Armenia, Telugu, and Syriac. Fragments from the Cairo Geniza and others written in Coptic and Demotic on papyrus round out the collection.
The library also holds the personal letters of more than 50 Jewish-American leaders from the 1800s and 1900s, including Isaac Leeser, Sabato Morais, and Abraham Neuman, Cyrus Adler, Charles Cohen, his journalist sister Mary M. Cohen, yiddish journalist , and the benefactor Moses Dropsie.

Publications

The Katz Center houses the Jewish Quarterly Review, the oldest continuously-published journal of Judaic Studies in English. Founded in England in 1888 under the editorship of Claude Montefiore and Israel Abrahams, JQR first came to the U.S. in 1911 under the editorship of Solomon Schechter and Cyrus Adler. It is currently published by Penn Press. The Katz Center partners with the University of Pennsylvania Press to publish the book series . The series is edited by Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, and Steven Weitzman.

Notable Fellows