Editor's Note

Editor's Note JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE AFfER THE SHOAH EDITOR'S NOTE 1 The following essays were originally written for a panel presentation for the 22nd Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust held in Tulsa in 1993. The panel was organized as a model for future dialogue between Christians and Jews for the sake of not only presenting a future for the conference but envisioning how dialogue can and should take place in all settings. In that sense, the set of papers form a unity despite the fact that they are produced by individual authors writing separately. That unity is formed by the common focus on texts, the shared criteria that shaped our individual efforts to read scripture together, and the public discussion of our papers in the panel setting. This common purpose and task was, therefore , emphasized by the inclusion of individual responses to the dialogue written by the original authors and included here as a concluding article for the whole discussion. In addition, the editor has written an introductory essay that stands as the opening article for this issue giving the rationale and the specific criteria that we agreed upon as a group as we wrote those original articles. We presented this panel as a model, thus a paradigm, for future Jewish-Christian dialogue after the Shoah believing that this focus on texts with the specific questions raised by the Shoah truly represents the direction that future Jewish and Christian thinking can and should take. Even so, we present these essays as a special issue of Shofar as another kind of model. The essays can be used as a model for courses in Jewish studies as well in at least four different ways. First, the essays can stand on their own as a resource for any class that focuses on texts, that concentrates on the shape of contemporaryJudaism, or that attempts to come to terms with post-Shoah Jewish or Christian thinking. We realize that we are indebted to a host of other thinkers who have paved the way for our work, but we do believe that our thinking together represents an important and unique new direction for thinking in dialogue. Second, the essays can be a model for understanding other efforts at post-Shoah Jewish thinking raising serious questions about what mayor may not be adequate. Thus, 2 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 the essays can be used to reflect on the current state of post-Shoah Jewish and Christian thinking. Third, the essays can be used to model how dialogue takes place, and in courses where inter-religious dialogue is an important factor the essays can be a model. Fourth, the essays can suggest a model for how to generate dialogue in class, even modelling how guests can be drawn in to illustrate for students how new directions in thinking can be formed. In this latter sense, the essays can actually be applied to many teaching situations in Jewish studies. We, therefore, offer these essays for use in teaching for any or all of these purposes. I wish to thank my colleagues in dialogue again for their contributions to what has become now an annual event at the Scholars Conference. I also wish to thank the editors ofShofar for their willingness to make these essays available for their readers in this special issue. James F. Moore Valparaiso University ...