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  • Farewell
  • Derek Penslar, Aron Rodrigue, and Steven J. Zipperstein

In the foreword to its inaugural issue in 1939—written by philosopher Morris R. Cohen, not his junior partner, historian Salo Baron—Jewish Social Studies announced that among its goals was the production of knowledge as a tool for “liberal democracy” against those endeavoring to impose a regimented, “goose-stepping way of life.” Many of the articles in its first years teetered at the edge of scholarship and advocacy, scientism and public policy.

Solid nearly always, stellar for much of its lifetime, the journal saw itself in the midst of meaningful conversation with the contemporary scene and sought to utilize scholarship to better understand the toxic forces it saw and feared in the United States and beyond. Its variegated goals, its belief, naïve but well intentioned, in the capacity of learning to dispel darkness—these impulses drew us to the journal, the first academic publication in which Aron and Steve published our work, a periodical all three of us followed with care from the moment we started thinking about Jewish scholarship. When Aron and Steve first appeared on its pages in the early and mid-1980s, it was still the premier academic journal in modern Jewish Studies in the English language; by the time of Baron’s death in 1989, it had slipped into a state of near obsolescence. It was offered to us in 1993, and the first issue of the new series appeared a year later.

We decided not to change its title, though dated, even irrelevant. We did this for several reasons, but mainly to underline that the core of first-rate scholarship, no matter how innovative, is abiding regard for what came before it. We hoped to construct a journal where the fullest range of first-rate scholars could speak to one another within the same pages. They would appear under a banner that made no sense (what, in fact, did Jewish Social Studies now mean?), but it seemed to us that the innovative qualities of the new series would be highlighted, rather than diminished, by the retention of the venerable title, which would be both a coda and a sign of departure into new forms of scholarly knowledge of the Jewish past.

We viewed history as the journal’s core focus, although not at the exclusion of other modes of exploring the Jewish past. We concentrated on modernity, but with an interest in looking backward, too. The composition of the journal’s editorial board itself was meant to constitute a generational statement, with all drawn from the cohort that had entered the field when Jewish Studies was just beginning to consolidate itself as a fixture in the North American university world. [End Page iii] Among the issues that had confronted all of us, in one way or another, were conflicting categories of excellence. What, in other words, was truly required—linguistically, textually, or otherwise—to achieve mastery of Jewish Studies? What did intellectual integration, rather than mere membership in the university world, entail? What was lost, what was gained, what changed in texture and substance once one’s immediate scholarly community became less coherent, less readily identifiable, less embedded in the same textual tradition, and also less homogeneously Jewish?

We sought ways in which our journal might clarify whether assumptions of intellectual centrality and marginality were themselves all the more pronounced in Jewish Studies, and if so, whether this was because of the ongoing, intimate connections between the field and the religious tradition that inspired it, to which so many of its practitioners belonged. What implicit assumptions did the Jewish tradition impart regarding what was and was not deemed crucial in the academic study of things Jewish? To what extent was classical textual knowledge still held up as an emblem for Jewish scholarship, and to what extent was this inevitable given the rhythms of Jewish life over the ages? How crucial was classical Jewish training to, say, a specialist in American Jewish history or Soviet/post-Soviet Jewish Studies? To what extent did still-influential quarters of Jewish Studies continue to treat secular Jewish culture as something akin to ices between the courses of a...

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