The archive, the largest collection of its kind, engages with people around the world interested in Jewish culture.
Images from album covers in the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, clockwise from left: “An Actor’s Holiday With Theodore Bikel” (1956); “Sunsets, Women, and all the Rest” with lyric singer Dany Granot; “Popular Yiddish Songs With Chayele Shiffer” (1984); “Yoselle Rosenblatt’s 40th Anniversary Memorial Album” (1973).
In 2003, just one year after professors Lewis Glinert and Alexander Hartov founded the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, Theodore Bikel, the celebrated American actor, singer, and political activist who toured for decades as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, wrote to them to request access.
"It's like having someone like Shostakovich suddenly write to you," recalls Glinert, a professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Program.