Heard Libraries host Jewish history scholars for workshop spotlighting special collections!
Schocken at Vanderbilt
The Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries hosted talks by two international scholars of Jewish history and culture on April 10 in the Central Library Community Room. Markus Krah, the John H. Slade Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute–New York/Berlin, and Caroline Jessen, a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture–Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, Germany, discussed the life and legacy of German-Jewish philanthropist and publisher Salman Schocken.
Schocken (1877–1959) was a department store magnate in pre-World War II Germany who established a publishing house in Berlin in 1931. The Schocken Verlag published the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and S.Y. Agnon, among others, before being shut down by the German government in 1939.
Schocken relaunched the company as Schocken Books in New York in 1945. In his talk, Krah examined how Schocken sought to shape Jewish identity and culture in the U.S. through his English-language publishing catalog. When the iconic square “s” logo from Schocken’s department stores reappeared as the logo for his American publishing house in 1946, it symbolized the continuity and resilience of Jewish culture. Today, Schocken Books endures as a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that specializes in Jewish literary works.
Jessen, a scholar of German literature with a focus on material culture, discussed the publisher’s approach to formats, series and book covers in his signature Schocken Library series. Launched in 1946, the series featured scholarly texts, prose, poetry and folklore as well as works by significant Jewish authors and those writing about Jewish topics. Schocken Books aimed to publish “modern books for the modern Jewish reader,” and, as longtime editor Nahum N. Glatzer said, “a diversity of opinions within the Jewish world.”
Jessen, who is serving as the Max Kade Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt for the spring 2025 semester, collaborated with Special Collections and University Archives to curate an exhibit of items from Vanderbilt’s Nahum N. Glatzer Collection. The collection preserves numerous programmatic texts including sales brochures, catalogs, book order forms, publisher’s notes, book jackets and more. “Some sentences come and go, others stay, but every text seems to be a fresh attempt to come to terms with what Schocken Books really is about,” Jessen writes in her exhibit notes. “Even the most inconspicuous, ad hoc drafts offer valuable insights into how Schocken Books’ editors grappled with articulating the unique character of their publishing program and philosophy.”
The April 10 event was organized by the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt and its director, Meike Werner, Centennial Chair in German Studies, in cooperation with the Department of German, Russian and East European Studies in the College of Arts and Science and Special Collections and University Archives at the Heard Libraries.
“This workshop is the result of a meaningful collaboration between the Max Kade Center and Special Collections, and I want to extend thanks to everyone who made it possible,” University Librarian Jon Shaw said. “Special Collections are often thought of as a repository of the past—and they are. But more importantly, they are spaces where we make connections: to our histories, to each other, and to the questions that continue to shape our cultural and intellectual lives. This program is a wonderful example of that.”