Subject Guide: Environmental History
Ella Jordan-Smith
A guide to archival and library sources on various facets of environmental history available at the Center for Jewish History.
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ARCHIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

Joseph A. Rosen Papers (RG 358)

Joseph A. Rosen was an agronomist and official of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In the 1920s and 1930s he organized and coordinated relief activities for impoverished Jews in the Soviet Union. Joseph A. Rosen was a director of the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation (Agro-Joint) that tried to develop Jewish settlements and assisted with the organization of Jewish factories, cooperatives, schools, and health care facilities. These are the papers of Joseph A. Rosen in his official capacity as a Director of the Agro-Joint. The collection contains agreements between Agro-Joint and the Soviet government, reports, and field observations of the agronomists and officials of the relief organizations, particularly of the Agro-Joint, technical reports and documentation necessary for development and financial sustainability of the Jewish settlements. Maps and landscape plans are also part of this collection.

Records of the Jewish Colonization Association (RG 236)

This is a partial inventory of the Records of the Jewish Colonization Association. Portion of JCA records described here pertains to JCA activities in Galicia and Russia only. Included here are reports on JCA colonies, cooperative savings and loans societies, agricultural schools, vocational and technical schools, carpentry workshops, mechanized embroidery factories and weaving factories.

LIBRARY HIGHLIGHTS

Biro-Bidzhan: zemleustroĭstvo trudi͡ashchikhsi͡a evreev v SSSR = Biro-Bijan: agriculture of labouring Jews in the U.S.S.R. of Birobidzhan; BIR-196, 1930.

Der Yidisher landvirt: The struggle of Jewish agriculture in interwar Poland., 1981.

ARCHIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

Association for Jewish Farm Settlements, 1932-1935 (RG 419)

An organization in New York formed to create a Jewish agricultural colony for unemployed workers. Chaim Zhitlowsky was its honorary chairman. Circulars and correspondence relating to organizational activities. Materials relating to the convention of 1933. Financial materials. Lists of candidates for colony membership, resolutions, by-laws, minutes of meetings.

Axelrod Collection on New Jersey Homesteads (RG 1562)

The collection consists of copies of news clippings, copies of photographs, copies of interviews and documents on homesteads located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The community is now known as Roosevelt. Roosevelt was an all-Jewish community of 200 families, established in 1933 by the U.S. Farm Security Administration, together with several Jewish organizations. It was engaged in chicken farming and garment manufacturing. The families were former garment workers from New York City.

Baron de Hirsch Fund / Jewish Agricultural Society Collection (RG 651)

This collection contains documents and photographs of the Baron de Hirsch Fund and its subsidiary, the Jewish Agricultural Society. The entire collection pertains to Jewish farm settlement in the United States from 1885 until the 1960s. The photographs that constitute the prevailing portion of the collection come from the files of The Jewish Farmer, a periodical published by the Jewish Agricultural Society.

Link Fligl Collection (RG 2319)

Linke Fligl was a queer Jewish chicken farm and cultural organizing project which operated from 2016 to 2022 in Millerton, NY. This collection contains papers related to Linke Fligl events, organizational development, and sales and distribution. Objects in the collection include merchandise, signage, and tapestries and other textiles. The Linke Fligl collection may be of interest to researchers of leftist/radical politics; cultural organizing; diasporism; queer, rural life; and farming and agriculture movements through a Jewish lens.

Sunrise Cooperative Farm Community Records (RG 432)

A Jewish collectivist agricultural colony organized in 1933 in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan and dissolved in 1938. Constitution, minutes of meetings, periodic reports, financial statements. Clippings from the Yiddish press relating to the colony. Memoirs of Bezalel Pargman and M. Stein, former members of the colony. Mimeographed newsletter*Sunrise News*, 1934, 1935.