Introduction

As Shofar’s new coeditors, we take the helm of an enterprise with a richly varied history. Founded in 1981, Shofar was first established by Joseph Haberer, the longtime director of Purdue University’s Jewish Studies Program, as a departmental newsletter. In time, it became the official journal of the Midwest and Western Jewish Studies Association. The title reflected its overarching mission. For thirty-five years, Shofar published essays—by both established and younger scholars—pertaining to Jews and Judaism covering the entire world, often exceptionally diffuse in its coverage. Today our editorial vision is more tempered, yet still aspirational. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on modern history, literature, culture, and the arts, we hope to enliven the field of Jewish studies through rigorously researched and critically vetted new research, offering an attractive venue for scholars to disseminate their work.

The journal features several categories of contributions. The review essay moves beyond the traditional book review format by offering comprehensive analysis of broader movements, events, or questions. Putting several scholarly works in conversation with one another, the review essay is expected to have a significant scholarly apparatus and push the boundaries of scholarly debate. The book forum brings experts in the field to address path-breaking, new scholarship. Essays published in the forum Contemporary Critical Jewish Studies explore present-day problems in historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts. Using cutting-edge concepts and methods from the social sciences or cultural studies, the essays address particularly urgent political and cultural events, drawing on original scholarship.

The Spring 2018 issue marks the launch of a rejuvenated Shofar both inside and out, as indicated by this issue’s splendid cover art contributed by comics artist Sharon Rudahl (look for more original illustrations from other esteemed artists in the months ahead). The very first contribution we received to Shofar’s new series impressed us for its especially innovative contribution to Israeli musicology. In “Ḥama venehederet (Hot and Wonderful): Home, Belonging, and the Image of the Yored in Israeli Pop Music” coauthors Jasmin Habib and Amir Locker-Biletzki delve into representative lyrics composed by Arik Einstein and others in the 1970s to consider the ever-shifting portrayal of the Israeli émigré or sojourner abroad in relation to class, politics, and sociological concerns. In their critically imaginative exploration, Habib and Locker-Biletzki examine the composition and performance of popular songs amidst pivotal historical crises to illuminate varied forms of belonging as well as estrangement from the Jewish state. In our second coauthored essay, William Velvel Moskoff and Carol Gayle interrogate the complex socioeconomic and ideological factors that influenced the diminishing role of traditional shabbat observance in the lives of immigrants to the United States. Their “ ‘Our Temples Are Deserted’: The Jewish Sabbath Observance Movement in New York, 1879–1930” tells a complex story of a valiant but somewhat quixotic effort to restore piety to the lives of those pressured by the daunting forces of assimilation and economic challenges, further complicated by the significant rift between established German Jews and their more recent Russian Jewish coreligionists. In her illuminating discussion of a provocative facet of Jewish American self-understanding a century later, Dory Fox finds that the community’s traditional preoccupation with distinctiveness is taking new and ultimately unpredictable forms. Fox’s “ ‘We Are in the First Temple’: Fact and Affect in American Jews’ Emergent Genetic Narrative” is an intriguing account of how the field of genetics seems likely to wield a potent force in repositioning and reorienting the Jewish relationship to their oral traditions and official histories of Jewish peoplehood. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to posthumously publish an essay by the scholar Kalman P. Bland. A noted medievalist, Bland’s lively and accessible “Medieval Jewish Perspectives on Human Rights” has timely resonance for our present moment. In juxtaposing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in 1948, with core tenets of medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy, exemplified in the thought of Maimonides and Al-Farabi, Bland reaches intriguing conclusions about individualist vs. communitarian-founded notions of justice.

In addition to publishing...