About
Welcome to the Jewish Kentucky Repository. This site is a work-in-progress (last updated 5/22/2019), currently being developed to create a visually attractive repository of primary archival materials related to Jewish Kentucky and an easily navigable digital access point for the narratives voiced in the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. Right now, you can access 50 of the 119 interviews already collected and indexed by clicking on the "Oral Histories" tab above. As more indexes move through final editing and more interviews are conducted, they will be added here.
This site and the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project it emerges from are made possible thanks to a unique partnership between University of Kentucky’s Interdisciplinary Program in Jewish Studies, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center, the UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center, and University of Kentucky students who contribute to an innovative initiative that documents and preserves Kentucky’s Jewish heritage. We are especially grateful for the generous financial support of the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) which facilitated the collection and transcription of the first 119 interviews.
Originally conceived to collect a minimum of 55 oral histories from Jewish Kentuckians across the Commonwealth, the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project currently includes 119 interviews and continues to grow. Students make these interviews accessible to anyone with an Internet connection by creating searchable, digital indexes using the Nunn Center’s cutting-edge, open-source platform, OHMS (the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer). JHFE Scholars, who receive a multi-year scholarship to complete a minor in Jewish Studies at UK, along with students enrolled in WRD 112: Writing Jewish Kentucky and WRD 401: Composing Oral History, have piloted a model for sustainable growth by both indexing extant interviews and conducting original oral history interviews which are added to the collection. You can read more about our team's "sustainable stewardship" model for ensuring that searchable access to the collection keeps pace with collection growth in our Oral History Review article. Additional undergraduate and graduate students have further developed this model for student research by discovering relevant primary archival materials, digitizing them, creating metadata for them, and adding them to this repository. These rich materials provide archival context that connects these oral histories to trends in American and Southern Jewish history. Many students in WRD 401: Composing Oral History have education backgrounds and created rich pedagogic materials aimed at high school teachers for their final student-authored Exhibits. These materials provide oral history-centered lesson plans.
Student research emerging from the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project has been presented at the Rhetoric Society of America 2016, the Southern Jewish Historical Society 2017, Posters at the Capitol Undergraduate Research Symposium in Frankfort, KY 2019, the UK Chellgren Showcase of Undergraduate Research, and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2019.
Hannah Newberry presented her research poster "Pa-Jew-Cah: Documenting Paducah's Jewish History" at multiple conferences in 2019, and Hannah Thompson received a UK Libraries' Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for her research poster "Medical Innovations at Jewish Hospital Louisville."
In Spring 2018, co-founders of the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, Dr. Janice W. Fernheimer and Dr. Beth L. Goldstein convened the Kentucky Jewish History Symposium, which featured recognized scholars and student presenters, and attracted more than 120 attendees from the Lexington Jewish community, UK campus, and greater Commonwealth. In Spring 2019 they co-edited a special issue of Shalom focused on the project, which published essays from students, UK Libraries staff, and community members involved with the project.They are hard at work editing a special issue of the Journal of Jewish Identities focused on Kentucky Jewish Identities which grows out of research presented at the KJHS.
Take-Down Policy: Parties who have questions or who wish to contest the use or display of specific items on Jewish Kentucky may contact Dr. Fernheimer, jfernheimer@uky.edu.
With all such communications, please include:
• The reason for the request.
• A URL to the item on the Jewish Kentucky site.
All correspondence will be answered within a reasonable time.