In volume 111.2 of JQR, historian Zohar Segev wrote an article, “Rethinking the Dilemma of Bombing Auschwitz: Support, Opposition, and Reservation,” that relied on new archival documents to argue that World Jewish Congress official Leon Kubowitzki lobbied U.S. administration officials to consider a ground assault on the Auschwitz extermination camp.

In JQR 112.2, David Guedj writes about a set of essays written by Moroccan Jewish children over the course of a few months in 1930–1931. The essays were published in the Casablanca Jewish newspaper L’Avenir illustré, as the paper tried an experiment: emulating a new interest in youth culture pursued by non-Jewish publications, the paper established a page dedicated to the voices and interests of young people.

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: