The Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age collects the voices and materials of groups and activists that have defined the American Jewish left since Occupy Wall Street. In collaboration with NYU’s Tamiment Library and an advisory board of expert scholars, the AAJLDA is building a robust and accessible digital collection using the best practices of cataloguing, preservation, and collection.
The Archive of the American Jewish Left aims to document the growth and activities of twenty-first-century leftist Jewish institutions by collecting their records, preserving the voices of leaders and participants, tracking their appearance in the public arena, and making materials accessible to researchers today and in the future. It is a living project of collecting and meaning making.
By creating an archive of the present, capturing a movement that continues to develop and thrive, our goal is to build historical consciousness about its significance. For scholars and the public today, that consciousness will shed light on the current moment, when political division and generational tension run high, and will draw attention to the Jewish left’s reinvigoration and its participants’ relationship to a longer history of Jewish leftism. For future historians, the Archive of the American Jewish Left will serve as an invaluable record of the people, movements, and challenges that preoccupied a subset of American Jews in the early decades of the new millennium.