Anne Albert Flies the Coop
JQR says farewell to its executive editor
One wants the best for one’s friends and colleagues—really one does—but sometimes our goodwill is tested, as it was when Anne Oravitz Albert told us she was leaving her role as executive editor of JQR to accept a new job. She leaves behind a gaping hole.
Anne has been part of the fabric of the Katz Center since arriving as a graduate student working under David Ruderman. She has since filled a wide array of tasks, from being a fellow (twice) to serving for the last decade as the Klatt Family Director for Public Programs. As Klatt Director, she has transformed a modest program consisting of a bunch of sleepy synagogue talks into a broad-reaching, intellectually rich slate of programming in multiple media seen and appreciated by audiences globally. She has the rare ability both to understand scholarship and know how to translate it to general audiences.
Of all her work it is JQR that may be closest to her heart. Anne’s ties to the journal began with a piece that she published back in 2014: “The Rabbi and the Rebels: A Pamphlet on the Herem by Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca” (vol. 104, no. 2). This article eventually would serve as a key foundation of her monograph Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam (Littman, 2022), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.
Anne came to JQR as executive editor eleven years ago and has been a vital member of the editorial troika. She moves easily from broad perspectives on the field to discerning judgments of individual contributions. She also has overseen a good deal of the journal’s day-to-day operations, modernizing the journal’s manuscript tracking, training copyeditor after copyeditor to follow JQR’s meticulous but idiosyncratic style sheet, creating our social media, and blogging our content.
As much as the journal will miss her, we, her editorial colleagues, will miss her as a person even more.
We wish her great success in her new role as director of communications and operations in the College of Arts and Sciences at Penn.
