New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Fall 2021

JQR 111.4 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

A forum on Jewish Latin America heads up the issue. Short essays by Pablo Palomino, Devi Mays, Ilan Stavans, Raanan Rein, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Michael Rom, and Adriana Brodsky set Jewish Latin American individuals into a dynamic global circulation of people and ideas and speak to an instructively broad understanding of Jewish experience and Jewish studies alike. A virtual round table on the field of Latin American Jewish studies featuring the forum's contributors will appear on the blog shortly.

Amit Gvaryahu examines tannaitic prescriptions for use and abuse of Roman coins, treating them as a test case for the complex relationship between the early rabbis and the empire to which they were subject.

Ron Lasri reads a fourteenth-century compilation of aggadic stories about Jewish informers to the Spanish crown. The stories were frequently cited in legal debates on the legitimacy of the death penalty for informers, and the compiler, Yitzhak Aboab, encouraged one moral interpretation of an ambivalent corpus.

Irven Resnick argues that medieval accounts of Jews’ abusing the cross were not merely Christian fabrications or literary inventions, but likely point to actual behavior, as some Jews saw such acts as a defiant sign of Jewish identity.

Michal Ohana surveys Jewish philosophical and religious thought in Fez in the generations following the Spanish Expulsion. Writings from this context show that traditions of Spanish Jewish thought were alive in Morocco, and not only in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Allison Schachter analyzes how women figured in the early twentieth-century Yiddish writings of Sholem Aleichem and Abraham Cahan, in order to argue that women’s active participation in modern Jewish culture shaped modern Jewish masculinity. This essay is free to access on Project Muse without a subscription for six months.

Check back here for related content coming soon.

*The most recent four years of JQR are distributed online to subscribers through Project Muse.

As always, see jqr.pennpress.org to subscribe and get access to all 130 years of JQR content.