Notes on Notes

The Jewish Quarterly Review has an interest in both sides of the scholar—the archival hermit and the public intellectual, the long form creator of knowledge, the pithy essayist, the revealer of the telling footnote. Short-form scholarship is featured in several recent and upcoming issues. 

In JQR 106.2 the journal will celebrate the genre of the essay with a forum devoted to one of its masters: Solomon Schechter. On the centennial anniversary of his death, JQR invited six noted scholars to write essays inspired by one of Schechter’s own gems. The resulting forum, "On Muses and Mystics: Some Essays on Some Essays by Solomon Schechter," will appear this spring.

A "note" is a small piece of scholarship: it can be a gem from the archives that doesn't fit into a scholar's present research agenda but deserves to be shared, or a small mental connection or corrective to existing literature that does not require the full apparatus of a journal article. Galit Noga-Banai contributed such a piece to JQR 105.3 on the power of the relic in Israeli culture through the odd case of Yosef Trumpeldor’s disembodied arm. 

The review essay is another academic genre that has the potential to elicit vivid writing and bold thinking. Gil Anidjar stirs the waters in his “The History of Race, the Race of History” (JQR 105.4); and together, four related review essays will reflect trenchantly and productively on the state of the field of Irano-Talmudica (coming up in JQR 106.2)

Stay tuned for future forums and short essays on topics as diverse as education and the Jewish enlightenment, Jews with Christian wet nurses, King Solomon’s demonic doppelgänger, epistolary culture, and the blessings of assimilation.