from Jewish Social Studies Volume 10, Number 1

Note from the Editors

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

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When invited to edit this journal, established in 1939 under the leadership of Morris R. Cohen and his then-junior partner, Salo Baron, we were acutely aware of its distinguished record in scholarship, its impeccable standards in its best years, and the need to adapt it to new academic needs and interests. Both of us had published our first articles in its pages under Baron’s editorship, but it was not for reasons of sentiment that we chose to maintain its now-anachro­nistic title. In keeping it, we sought to underline how quite nearly always at--or at least near--the core of first-rate scholarship is an abiding preoccupation with one’s teachers and their lessons. We hoped to create a journal where younger and older scholars, provocateurs and the cau­tious might mingle between the same cover, where they would be encouraged to read one another’s work, and where they could speak to one another in ways more open, perhaps, than if compelled to do so face to face.

We decided that there was no need to take a principled stance on the approaches to the study of the history and culture of the Jews we thought best. We sought from the outset to showcase what seemed the most interesting and important work that was being done on Jewish history, especially in the modern period, and in those areas intersecting with the discipline of history. Both of us understood that to be a good journal editor meant that one must remain an active scholar who, nonetheless, expends much energy displaying the work of others. To be sure, for a scholarly journal to remain vivid it must be sustained by ongoing, intently personal intellectual enthusiasms. If these remain its sole, even primary inspirations, however, it will almost certainly ossify and turn in the direction of sophistry and narcissism. A journal sustained without enthusiasm is certain to become characterless and ge­neric, but the alternative extreme is, arguably, still worse.

Perusing the bibliographic index in this issue, with its list of the articles published in the first decade of the new series of Jewish Social Studies, it is clear that we have succeeded in introducing something new and consistently interesting into the field of Jewish history--at a moment of considerable flux. The new series appeared just as Jewish Studies had managed to enter most of the major universities and colleges in the United States, but its ability to speak beyond itself--an essential, inescapable feature of academic life--while building and sustaining itself as a coherent field remained much in doubt. Implicit in the many articles published in our series might be found a discrete cluster of preoccupations regarding the nature of Jewish Studies as a field, among them the following: What price must be paid for the intellectual integration of Jewish Studies into the university? To what extent does integration mean heightened fragmentation in a field that grows, with every passing year, less and less coherent, with its practitioners increasingly addressing altogether different, even mutually exclusive audiences? Should these be cause for concern? If so, how can they be addressed?

These questions continue to figure among the issues that we, as editors of JSS, grapple with as the journal moves into its second decade under our direction. We see, to be sure, great reason for optimism if only because of the high quality, range, and breadth of the articles that have been published in this journal over the past 10 years and that continue to arrive, steadily, at our office at Stanford University. At its best, ours is a vivid, truly lively field of study, and we have been privileged as editors to publish an abundance of learning--diverse in its methodology, alert to the internal tensions of Jewish Studies, its relationship to other areas in the humanities, and beyond.

In issue after issue, journals that remain alert to the various, conflicting intellectual needs of their fields can provide the reassurance that knowledge builds on itself and that its cumulative voices constitute the building blocks of the larger academic world. Nowhere can one better glimpse the bricks and mortar that make up academia than in the pages of a good journal. When doing their work right, journals should teach and exasperate, journals should mute, perhaps even momentarily deaden the inevitable isolation of scholarly life, and journals should remind us that learning, even at its best, can be recast in the wake of the reactions of readers, then launched anew in another journal issue to be debated and, if appropriate, recast again. A first-rate journal is, at its core, an exercise in extended, learned conversation; it must be cognizant and, indeed, must take pleasure in the existence of the many, disparate voices in one’s field. Unless it recognizes--and treasures--serious, wide-ranging debate and a multiplicity of thoughtful perspectives, it will, almost certainly and justly, marginalize itself.

The original JSS occupied that intellectual space between scholarship and advocacy. It took to heart its empiricist obligation to promulgate what it deemed to be accurate information about Jews (in what was a singularly beleaguered moment) while helping to put the scholarship about Jews, finally, onto the American academic map. It was a child of scientism, a product of the Jewish enlightenment in its commitments and its assumptions regarding the redemptive potential of knowledge.

Our central preoccupations as editors of this distinguished journal are, of course, rather different. But we are cognizant that we edit a periodical which, from the time of its origins, was keenly aware of its various, complex, yet ever-identifiable intellectual goals. Many of these goals have shifted, but this model of self-awareness and seriousness of purpose, this model of intellectual experimentation predicated on a deep knowledge of one’s own field and much more beyond it, too, remains an inspiration for us still.

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