The Annenberg Research Institute was a center for advanced study in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam founded in 1986 with staff and collections carried over from Dropsie College.

[4] The Katz Center houses offices for scholars who are in residence throughout the academic year for postdoctoral research, as well as an extensive library of Judaica,[5] a reading room, and seminar and meeting spaces.

[7] Weekly seminars allow fellows to share their findings with each other and with invited scholarly guests; annual conferences are open to the wider academic community.

Some of the languages and dialects represented include Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, Latin, Judeo-Arabic, Armenia, Telugu, and Syriac.

The library also holds the personal letters of more than 50 Jewish-American leaders from the 1800s and 1900s, including Isaac Leeser, Sabato Morais, and Abraham A. Neuman (three ministers of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia), Cyrus Adler (president, Dropsie College, Mikveh Israel, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Theological Seminary of America; librarian, Smithsonian Institution), Charles Cohen (president, Mikveh Israel, Fairmount Park Commission), his journalist sister Mary M. Cohen, Yiddish journalist Ben Zion Goldberg, and the benefactor Moses Dropsie.