In the months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Katz Center joined with the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and other research centers in an initiative to support colleagues in Ukraine—Jewish studies scholars, archivists, and others—who were seeking to continue their work under dangerous, unpredictable, and under-resourced conditions.
In their essay “Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity” (JQR 113.3) Natasha Gordinsky and Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan focus our gaze on fin de siècle Gomel, a small majority-Jewish city in the Pale of Settlement that produced an outsized share of literary genius.
Although it may seem like our staff brings a zealous, 24/7, laser-sharp focus to their work at the Katz Center, some (ok, all) have talents and interests that reach beyond our walls.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Katz Center and other institutions have been collaboratively figuring out how to support their Jewish studies colleagues in Ukraine. One form this support has taken is an initiative sponsoring mini-grants to Jewish studies scholars in Ukraine. Katz Center director Steven Weitzman reflects with other leaders of this initiative in this piece on a year of supporting scholars amidst war.
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.