The Power of the Archives
In 2015, six years after Alan Lew’s, the Post-Holocaust American Judaism (PHAJ) Collection at the University of Colorado and Lew’s widowed wife, author Sherril Jaffe Lew, agreed that his personal papers would fit with the PHAJ’s collections. Lew’s papers would add to PHAJ’s growing collection of material related to the Jewish Renewal movement. Now sitting alongside the papers of Jewish Renewal founder Zalman M. Schacter-Shalomi and Freedom Seder author and Civil Rights activist Rabbi Arthru Waskow, Lew’s records allows researchers to think about the many ways Jewish spiritual practice and activism changed in postwar America.
Lew's papers now being in Boulder proves that Jimmerson is right: archives are places of power. By choosing what to accept and what to deny, archives directly impact the kinds of stories future scholars will be able to tell. Lew’s papers are now in Boulder because archivists in 2015 agreed that his life and work matched PHAJ’s collecting goals. We can be glad that university officials felt Lew’s papers were worth preserving while keeping in mind that this exhibit would not exist, nor would we be discussing Alan Lew if Archivists and University officials had not believed Lew was significant.
[1] Jimerson, Randall C. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).