There is a growing and evolving field of research focused on Jews living in the Islamic world, from South Asia to North Africa and beyond, and from the Middle Ages to the present. Since last year, the Jewish Culture and Contexts series (JCC), which is published by Penn Press in collaboration with the Katz Center, has published four books breaking new ground on this scholarly frontier. These studies spotlight Jewish communities at different places and times throughout Islamic history, illuminating them with a diverse array of written and material sources.

JQR 115.1 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

The following is adapted from Anne Albert’s introduction to the forum in our pages.

JQR 114.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

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.

While the Katz Center focuses much of its energy on its annual fellowship, it also supports new research in other more experimental ways, including conferences, institutional partnerships, and other forward-looking initiatives.

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.

Today, Jews constitute only tiny communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, but the region has a rich and varied Jewish past that is now preserved in an extensive reservoir of material culture. Numerous synagogues, cemeteries, ritual objects and other Judaica, and writings are dispersed across Arab and Islamic countries.

JQR 114.1 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

JQR debuts a new look! The journal has been redesigned inside and out, reflecting our legacy of producing the best in Jewish studies past and present.