The Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress hosted the Fifth Annual Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lecture on the Hebraic Book on June 7, 2004 in the Thomas Jefferson of the Library of Congress.

Jonathan D. Sarna presented a lecture “The Jewish Book in America”. Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chairs the Academic and Editorial Board of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. He also serves as chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History and of Celebrate 350 and is the author most recently of American Judaism: A History.

The Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lecture on the Hebraic Book features scholarly presentations on Hebrew manuscripts and printed books, as well as on documentary and textual materials in other Hebraic languages, such as Yiddish and Ladino.

The scope of the lectures is meant to reflect the wide-ranging and eclectic scholarly interests of Myron M. Weinstein (1927-1998), who served his entire 29-year career at the Library of Congress in the Hebraic Section, which he headed from 1980 until his retirement in 1984. In 1991, after his retirement, he edited the commentary volume of the facsimile edition of the “Washington Haggadah,” a fifteenth-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript housed in the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress.