A Brief History of The Jewish Publication Society
JPS is 120 years old this year! We've got a rich history, and we want to share a little of it with you here, in a multi-part series unfolding over the next 12 months. We continue here with Part 3.
And also in celebration of 120 years, each month or so we'll be posting a new list of 120 Jewish notables—authors, dates in history, foods, Diaspora communities, and more. Visit here often to see them all!
Part 3, Important JPS Books
Though the Jewish Publication Society is widely known for its many Bible translations, it has also gained a place of distinction in the American Jewish community by publishing groundbreaking works of non-fiction. One of the Society's earliest and most important achievements came in 1898, with the publication of Heinrich Graetz's History of the Jews. Having an author like Graetz, one of the most renowned modern Jewish historians, was enough reason for the Society to be proud of such a book, but the six-volume boxed set went on to sell tens of thousands of copies. In print for over 75 years, it became one of JPS's most enduring titles.
The following year, in 1890, JPS began publishing a very different, but equally enduring type of book, the American Jewish Year Book. Each volume brought hundreds of facts on events and trends in American and world Jewish life together for easy reference. It was considered such a vital resource that the American Jewish Committee signed on to edit, then eventually to co-publish, the volumes, and in 1994 took over as sole publisher. All 108 volumes remain available today online through the AJC at www.ajcarchives.org.
JPS published books on many historical and contemporary subjects throughout the first few decades of the 20th century, but none would be as compelling as those written about the Holocaust. In 1939, Cold Pogrom served as stirring testimony to the Nazi threat. In the book, Max Berges followed a typical German Jewish family from pre-Nazi Germany through the first few years of Hitler's regime. Though Berges's work was a call to action that went largely unheeded, it paved the way for books on the Holocaust that JPS would publish in the ensuing decades, such as And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965) and the Anthology of Holocaust Literature (1969). Terrible Things, an allegory on the Holocaust published in 1993, has become one of JPS's best-selling and most award-winning children's books, and is used in school curricula across the country.
However, the series that perhaps most defined the high-quality and lasting impact of JPS's work throughout the first half of the 20th century was Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews. This landmark collection of biblical midrash was published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938. It is widely considered one of the greatest works of Jewish scholarship ever published in the U.S., and remains in print today in a new two-volume edition (2003).
Solomon Grayzel, a distinguished scholar, became the Society's editor-in-chief in 1939, a position he held for 27 years, longer than any other in that position before or since. During his tenure, JPS published his groundbreaking works of history, and he oversaw the publication of many other significant works, and the development of major projects that would serve to cement JPS's valued place in the American Jewish community through the late 20th century.
