CU Boulder's Innovations in Jewish Life Collections 1b

CU Boulder's Innovations in Jewish Life Collections 1b

Innovations in Jewish Life Collections

2023

Gregg Drinkwater, Hilary Kalisman, Samira Mehta, Maggie Rosenau

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The IJL Collections exist to document the work of the individuals and groups who transformed—and in many cases are still transforming—the American Jewish experience in the post-World War II period, and to make that experience accessible to students, researchers, and interested parties of all kinds.

Many of the items in the Innovations in Jewish Life Collections are linked to the Jewish Renewal community, a loosely-affiliated movement of Jews that emerged from within the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and among those Jews who turned to other religious traditions, especially Buddhism and Sufism, for inspiration and dialogue.

The formal administrative offices of ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal have long been based on the East Coast. But with the move to Boulder in 1994 of Jewish Renewal’s key co-founder, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Colorado, and Boulder specifically, became an epicenter for Jewish Renewal thought and action.

Called “Reb Zalman” by many in the Jewish world, Schachter-Shalomi left his papers and library to CU’s Innovations in Jewish Life Collections (then called the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections) upon his death in 2014. Reb Zalman’s papers served as a seed that enabled CU Boulder to collect material widely from among Jewish Renewal leaders and communities globally.