Founded in 1889, JQR spent nearly two decades in England before moving to Philadelphia in 1908 under new editorship. Peruse the contents of these early issues—now called the Old Series—and you’ll find Jewish literature in English translation among the journal’s early output. Translations ranged from Talmud to contemporary poetry and drew from Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and more.
The state of a nation’s press—its health or repression, its distance from or intimacy with organs of power—is a reliable bellwether of modernity. Newspapers routinely function as self-professed diagnosticians of culture and antidotes to its ills, even as they are themselves inescapably symptoms. In Daniel Amir’s essay in the summer issue of JQR, he looks at the explosion of press activity in Iran following the Allied occupation in 1941.
JQR 114.3 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
Elyashiv Cherlow brings new light to the provenance of a passage of the Jerusalem Talmud based on newly identified Cairo Geniza manuscript fragments.
JQR 114.2 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
Hanan Mazeh dissects a key passage in the Palestinian Talmud concerning land ownership that shows rabbis using the law—Jewish and Roman—to grapple with competing claims to territory. This essay is FREE to read and download without a subscription through July 15, 2024.
“Any minute now the world streams over its border” (Ot-ot gist zikh shoyn iber di velt bizn rand). So writes Soviet Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, a single resonant line among the hundreds in his eighty-page poem The Man of Forty (Der fertsikyeriker man), which his wife smuggled out of Stalinist Russia in a potato sack in 1949. Had she not done so it would surely have been seized by Stalin’s agents, who were moments from arresting the dissident poet when she departed.