From the Editor: Change of the Guard

From the outgoing editor

Before taking on the position of senior editor of History & Memory eight years ago, I made sure that I would be able to rely on the sound judgment and invaluable experience of Philippa Shimrat, who has been the journal’s managing editor since its inception in 1989. However, after a few years, it became clear that the volume of submissions had increased to such an extent that we could no longer cope with it alone. Thus, we were joined by an assistant editor – first Kobi Kabalek, and more recently Shmuel Lederman. Without my excellent partners in this endeavor, I could never have been able to do my job. My first thanks go to them. In addition, I am grateful to the many authors from all over the world who continue to send us their manuscripts, and also to our many thousands of loyal readers. The high esteem in which the scholarly community, authors and readers alike, holds the journal makes our work worthwhile.

I am proud to have been senior editor of a journal that provides a pivotal platform for outstanding research in the vast and complex area of scholarship on historical memory. Its focus has been, and presumably will remain, the manifold material and literary traces and representations of events in modern history and the way they affect contemporary historical consciousness. In addition, the journal has always been open to studies on non-European and premodern forms of historical memory. In this global age, I would have welcomed more studies on the role of the digital media in the formation of historical memory, exploring the impact of computer games, digitization, YouTube, interactive infographics and Wikipedia. My hope was to expand the journal’s horizon by publishing research on the role played by the new media as providers of popular history and memory beyond state borders. As it turned out, most submissions continue to explore the way state policies, commemoration ceremonies, memorial sites, textbooks, memoirs and museums shape and articulate national memory. It seems that the state and the old media continue to be the crucial players in the formation of contemporary historical consciousness—or at least remain so in the research.

I retired from teaching a year ago and now it is time to hand over the journal to a younger colleague. Scott Ury, a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specializing in Jewish history and Eastern Europe, is a perfect choice as new senior editor of History & Memory. He will bring new initiatives and energies to the journal and I am happy that he will be able to continue to rely on Philippa and Shmuel’s capable support. I wish him every success.

José Brunner

From the incoming editor

I would like to thank José Brunner and other members of the editorial board and journal team for their invitation to serve as senior editor of History & Memory, a leading journal in the field of memory studies.

As a scholar of East European and Jewish histories, I have long been fascinated by the relationship between history and memory as well as by many of the methodological questions that arise from this intersection. While these interests originate in the heated debates regarding the politics of memory in Israel, where I studied, live and work, and in Poland, where I conduct much of my research, they include an array of questions regarding the ways that scholars, public figures and their manifold audiences remember, forget and reconstruct various aspects of the past. At their core, my interests lie in a fascination with the role that conversations between past and present play in our efforts to make sense of the present through the lens of the past, and vice versa.

My primary goal as incoming editor of History & Memory will be to maintain the commitment to scholarly excellence that has characterized the journal under a series of distinguished editors such as Saul Friedländer, Gadi Algazi and José Brunner. On the thematic level, I am interested in many of the questions that the journal has grappled with for...