What does one learn when we avoid the gravitational field of a book’s content in favor of all the bits of history preserved in a book’s form? There is a rich tradition of studying books as material objects, and indeed there is much to learn from books as books, from the technology and economics of the book trade, to the ways knowledge is shaped or altered by page layout, to the ways the circulation of ideas may be subject to such apparently secondary factors as trade routes or family networks.

One of the distinctive features of the Jewish Quarterly Review over the past seventeen years—from the time that the brilliant and dearly departed Elliott Horowitz and I became coeditors—has been our reliance on the mode of the forum to debate, revisit, and probe.

JQR 112.2 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

JQR 112.1 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

Simcha Gross and Avigail Manekin-Bamberger introduce Aramaic incantation bowls that draw on rabbinic and elite literary sources, forcing a reevaluation of the “popular” religion traditionally ascribed to the bowls.

As much of the world expresses sorrow and solidarity with the Ukrainian people—and admiration for its president, Volodymyr Zelensky—the ironies of history abound. To students of Jewish history, it is a source of near incredulity that the same recurrent site of mass violence against Jews—from the Khmielnitsky massacres of the mid-seventeenth century to the brutal killing fields during and after World War I to the bloodlands soiled by Nazi murderers in Operation Barbarossa in 1941—is home to a fledgling democracy and an unlikely and inspiring Jewish president.

Raanan Rein: Rather than being a scholarly field in itself, Jewish Latin American studies should be viewed as a subfield of both Latin American studies and Jewish studies. For many years Jewish Latin American studies fell outside of the main parameters of the two abovementioned fields.

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

In this issue:

Hair Dye

Wet Cat food

Bra, tights

Vodka

JQR 111.3 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

On April 18–19, 2021, the Ancient Judaism Regional Seminar (AJRS) hosted its annual colloquium on Zoom. The seminar is dedicated to graduate training, and pairs graduate students in the Northeast together with senior scholars who respond to their papers as well as offering networking and professionalization session.