Author Archives: ajsADMin

Among books of Jewish interest, three that I find evoke reflective, often sophisticated, and sometimes passionate responses from students are:

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Classic House Books, 2008 [1947])

Which, in its bare-bones sobriety, strips away so much of the phony sentimentality, emotional exploitation, and political instrumentalization that frequently attach to literature of the Shoah.

Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial- Settler State? (Anchor Foundation, 1988 [1973]), which I generally teach together with J. L. Talmon, Israel among the Nations (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970)

Two cogently and eloquently argued statements of diametrically opposed views of the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict by two of the great historians of the last generation.

Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (University of Nebraska Press, 1996)

One of the great humane works of historical scholarship of the late twentieth century and also an effective antidote to Hannah Arendt's unhistorical, indeed one might say anti- historical, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

John Efron, Steven Weitzman, Matthias Lehmann, Joshua Holo, The Jews: A History (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009)

For many years the best of all one-volume treatments of Jewish life was Robert Seltzer's superb portrait of Judaism published by Mac- millan. Seltzer's remains a standard work, but now we have an equally authoritative, lucid history of everyday life and lore written a group of first-rate, younger scholars. It is a seamless collaborative work that reveals none of the repetitiveness or awkwardness so char- acteristic of collective efforts of this sort.

Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (HarperCollins, 1997)

One of the finest synthetic histories of twentieth-century European life written in any language, both in its subtle interplay of social, cultural, and political history and its capacity to integrate the voices of historical actors—and victims.

The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945–59: The Lesser Evil, abridged and translated from the German edition by Martin Chalmers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)

The post–World War II musings about Nazism, Communism, and, above all, linguist Klemperer's keenly felt, day-to-day vicissi- tudes. This heroic and astonishingly narcis- sistic volume is a superb way of introducing students to the smell and the feel of a primary source.

The text I would choose would be Joel and Ethan Coen's film, The Big Lebowksi (1998). While many of the Coens' films—Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), and, of course, A Serious Man (2009)—are essential to understanding contemporary Jewish cinema, The Big Lebowski is the epitome of many new Jewish cinematic trends, particularly those in evidence since 1990. Its key Jewish character Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) is not only a slightly deranged Vietnam veteran, he is also—atypically—a convert to Judaism. Unusually for a cinematic Jew, Walter is not identified by any decontextualized markers (indeed Walter is not even ethnically Jewish), but by his beliefs, values, and behavior. Thus Judaism rather than Jewish ethnicity defines Walter. Walter is doubly unusual in cinematic terms in that he is a convert and, for a non-haredi Jew, maintains a level of Jewish Orthodox practice. Walter appreciates, understands, and takes his adopted faith very seriously, certainly more so than many other Jews on film, haredi or otherwise. At the same time, I would argue that the Coens use Walter to mock the de-Semitizing and de-Judainizing strategies of the past. One cannot help reading him as nothing less than a deliberate parody of those Jewish directors (particularly the moguls of the studio system) who denuded their films of Jews and Judaism and/or produced crass, sentimentalized caricatures for didactic effect and Gentile consumption. Furthermore, Walter's passionate, even fanatical, adherence to the rules of bowling can be read as a critique of the increasing stringency amongst Orthodox and haredi Jews who, it has been argued, prioritize obedience over spirituality. Walter thus becomes a satiric representation of a particularly dogmatic and buffoonish rabbi. Overall, The Big Lebowski provides a wonderful text for considering contemporary Jewish cinema and how it has metamorphosed over the decades.

My first choice for a text to which to devote a graduate seminar would be Agnon's Tmol Shilshom [Only Yesterday]. I actually made it the topic of a Berkeley seminar in Hebrew literature that I taught in the early 1990s and regret that I haven't repeated it. Tmol Shilshom is arguably the greatest novel in Hebrew, and it is certainly the one modernist masterpiece in Hebrew. It needs to be read in the original because of its extraordinary stylistic subtlety and the rich play of irony and allusion detectable in the Hebrew. (The English translation is problematic, and when I once taught it in an undergraduate course, I don't think it went over very well.) Tmol Shilshom represents a strenuous reversal of the European Bildungsroman that ends in tragedy, or perhaps one should say, in a violent catastrophe for the protagonist that is an absurdist Akedah. Yitzhak Kummer is one of those young men from the provinces populating ninteenth-century fiction who makes the journey to fulfill himself not to the big city but to Palestine of the Second Aliyah. In the language of the old Zionist song invoked in the opening paragraph, he comes "to build and to be rebuilt," but his naïve aspirations turn into a shambles. Agnon offers a penetrating and unblinking portrait of the dilemmas of Jewish modernity, in part figured through Kummer's oscillation between bohemian Jaffa, where he has an erotic entanglement he can't really handle, and fanatically Orthodox Jerusalem, where he finds a pious bride and death. The inner contradictions of the Zionist enterprise and the lethal ferocity of Orthodoxy are equally exposed, and probing historical realism is interwoven with fantasy and macabre comedy in the chapters devoted to the reflections of Balak, the philosophical dog, one of Agnon's great inventions. The novel is densely textured with symbolic motifs, as the critics have shown, and endlessly inventive—perfect material for enjoyable and instructive investigation.

Maybe it's the fact I just finished a book on its author. Or maybe it's the fact my wife just gave birth to our first child earlier this week, so I'm particularly attuned to works featuring fathers and children. But I don't think those are the only reasons I'd pick Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman (Tevye der milkhiger) as my graduate seminar's central text. Our theoretically minded comparative literature students wouldn't know where to begin: would they write papers incorporating narratological theory to try to pin down Tevye's talking strategies? Would they employ discourses of gender and power to work on the representation of his daughters, and Tevye himself, constantly claiming he's no woman? Or would the deconstructionists come to the fore, citing Tevye's triumphant references to binary divisions—divisions the stories then work busily to undermine? They'd be challenged by our history students, who'd insist that to read the Tevye stories, written over more than two decades, is to read the story of modern Eastern European Jewry writ small. Some might try to tease out the particular ideologies represented by Tevye's daughters and their suitably unsuitable mates; and others might try to locate clues to their author's beliefs in the stories' complex publication history. And our Yiddish students, of course, would remind everyone of the language—Tevye only exists in language, after all, both as a fictional character and as a monologist. And they'd say that the robust history of literary criticism on Tevye can be a key to the history of Yiddish itself in the modern era, both in its Eastern European and American incarnations, both during Sholem Aleichem's life and the strange transformations and transmogrifications of his text's afterlife.

Two decades ago, while I was finishing my PhD in comparative literature, I fantasized about prospective employers asking me this question. Trained in the heyday of high theory and schooled in the virtues of close reading, I was prepared to suggest any number of texts whose rhetorical, formal, and philosophical complexity made them prime candidates for intensive study in a graduate seminar. Given the directions that the field and my own work have gone in over the last twenty years, structuring a seminar around a single text holds somewhat less appeal for me today. Indeed, my recent work has moved away from the model of close reading, whether exploring the vast body of popular fiction produced by Jews for Jews in nineteenth-century Germany or studying how performances of Jewishness on the nineteenth-century stage helped give rise to cultures of liberal universalism.

Rather than dedicating a seminar to close analysis of one text, I would organize a seminar on the transnational performance history of the most popular German play of the late nineteenth century, and a text that, tellingly, no one ever suggested I read while I was in graduate school: Salomon Hermann Mosenthal's Deborah (1849). When it first took German stages by storm in the 1850s, Mosenthal's melodrama was dismissed and despised by both the literary elite and official organs of Jewish community life. But Deborah became for Jews and non-Jews in nineteenth- century Europe and America the most popular drama on a Jewish theme and a favorite vehicle for celebrity actresses and aspiring stars alike. Deborah was translated into thirteen languages, including English, where it was known primarily as Leah, The Forsaken, but also as Miriam, Naomi, Ruth, Hager, and Lysiah, The Abandoned. The seminar would certainly involve close reading, depending on students' linguistic skills, of German, English, American, and other adaptations of Deborah. But students would read these texts against the backdrop of the Czech opera Debora, the American burlesque Leah, The Forsook, the British novel Leah, The Jewish Maiden, and at least one of the three silent films based on Deborah. Focusing on the cultural mobility of this material, I would accompany readings of texts with close readings of responses to performances of Deborah in the nineteenth-century press. I would introduce all this material with a survey of key precursors, from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Lessing's Nathan the Wise, and Richard Cumberland's The Jew to selections from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and scenes from Fromental Halévy and Eugène Scribe's grand opera La juive. Recent work in theater history and performance studies would give the course its theoretical interlocutors—and its rationale for supplementing the sacrosanct model of close reading that was so crucial to the way an entire generation of literary scholars was trained.

My choice of a single text around which to situate a Jewish Studies course would be Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise (TTP, published 1670). Admittedly, this is a fraught choice in this context, given that Spinoza was famously excommunicated from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam in 1656. Moreover, his writings are often taken to equate God and nature and thus espouse a pantheistic impetus above and beyond a monotheistic one; and his at times quite comical assessment of the Hebrew prophets in the TTP is generally far from flattering. My course would examine such theological reflections directly and through close textual analysis; with this, I would devote the first part of the term simply to a careful reading of the text, without relying on outside sources. Then, for the remaining weeks, I would introduce the students to the rather extraordinary range of commentary on Spinoza and on this text specifically. We would look at the tendency to read the TTP in light of Spinoza's most celebrated work, The Ethics (1677), thereby downplaying the theological dimension of his oeuvre, something notable especially in studies of his work by eminent Continental philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar, and the excellent collection by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, The New Spinoza). I would then turn to an increasing body of work on Spinoza that regards him as a Jewish thinker despite his clear distance from and tension with Judaism, in the fashion of Daniel Boyarin's A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (e.g. Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza). Related to this is the important work of Jonathan Israel, Steven Nadler, and Willi Goetschel that considers Spinoza's Jewish background as the basis for a philosophical system that becomes one of the pillars of secular if not atheistic thought. Finally, I would turn to the minor strain of criticism that takes seriously the fact that Spinoza favors apostles over prophets in the TTP and holds the example of Christ considerably higher than those of the Hebrew prophets. In this context, Graeme Hunter's Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought is exemplary. Having taught a graduate seminar on "apostate Jews" in which the TTP was one of the featured texts, I see the merit of devoting a whole seminar to it.

The Jewish Catalog. It is a brilliant, vexing, peculiar, uneven document of American Jewish life in the late twentieth century. It emerged at the intersection of so many complementary and contradictory forces that it offers a way into any number of conversa- tions about the parameters and problematics of American Jewish education. An intentionally educational document, The Jewish Catalog can provide a window into Jewish communal politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, trends in American religion, the spiritual life of the counterculture, longer histories of guides to Jewish life, the dynamics of institutional and counter-institutional Jewish life, and the relationship between technology and education. And most of that does not begin to touch on the book's content, or what might be learned from conducting oral histories with the book's editors and contributors.

One of the challenges of graduate seminars is balancing the students' centripetal interests and the gravitational center of the class's discussion. The seminar should provide a space for ongoing, shared discussion that allows the students to continue developing their own ideas and interests that will eventually inform their dissertations. As a primary document, The Jewish Catalog could provide an opportunity for engaging in mixed-method or interdisciplinary research while still anchoring the seminar in a shared investment in a common text. It is accessible enough to be engaging and not open enough to be self-evidently meaningful. It is frustrating, fascinating, and funny, and it invites students to explore it through a variety of modes and methods.

My choice would be Henry Roth's 1934 novel, Call It Sleep, which is quite possibly the most subtle and comprehensive literary work addressing the American Jewish immigration experience. As with any truly "classic" work, Call It Sleep can be read (and has been) in sharply contrasting ways. It can be seen as a celebration of multilingualism and ethnic pluralism, as a Bildungsroman, as a masterpiece of urban modernism, as a meditation on the Oedipal dynamics of the immigrant family, as an expression of Jewish longing for the gentile world, and as a cautionary tale about the effects of jettisoning Jewish tradition in an all-out embrace of American freedom. Whereas countless modern Jewish works express some measure of ambivalence about categories such as tradition and modernity, Roth's novel could be more properly called "multivalent": it expresses a number of distinct viewpoints, each one seemingly with great conviction. For instance, the traditional rabbi is depicted as a cruel and ignorant brute, but the Jewish textual tradition (in this case the Parsha to Jethro) is valorized insofar as it offers the young hero a solution to his deepest anxieties—as well as a paradigm for approaching God.

A seminar devoted to Call It Sleep could identify its range of perspectives on Jewish modernity and American urban experience, while also raising fundamental hermeneutical questions about whether and how a definitive "reading" of the text might be possible at all. Various methodological approaches could also be introduced. A unit on intertextuality could focus on its dialogue with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and with Christian and Jewish readings of the Book of Isaiah. A unit on language could consider Roth's depiction of Yiddish as crystal-clear English, while also exploring the contrast between the broken English of the characters and the often exquisitely lyrical English of the third-person narrator. A unit on reception history could consider the dramatic resurgence of interest in the novel among second-generation American Jewish intellectuals in the early 1960s and, indeed, its position as a cornerstone in the emerging canon of Jewish American literature.

This is an interesting exercise for a variety of reasons. First, it allows us to ponder what might be the goals of a graduate seminar more generally. Second, it enables us to explore the singularity of a text, removing it from its embedded and contextual place as part of a book or compilation in order to see whether and how one text can carry the weight of an entire semester.

I have chosen Nahman of Bratslav's Likkutei MoHaRan I:64 as my text. Many of the col lected homilies of Nahman (this one included) are fairly detailed examples of hermeneutic virtuosity focused around a narrow theme, often veering far afield to include many other subjects that are then swept back, through the warp and woof of midrashic/kabbalistic read- ing, to the central question. Written in a loose, proemic style whose focus is often a personal rather than textual subject, Nahman's work offers students exposure to a variety of textual and theological issues. It exposes students to the world of rabbinic/kabbalistic texuality while simultaneously offering them a window into the personalistic and devotional focus of Hasidic and pietistic Jewish spirituality.

The themes of lesson #64 are doubt and heresy framed around Moses' confrontation with Pharaoh and Pharaoh's "hardened heart" (Exodus 10:1–4). What is so intriguing about this homily is the personal notion of self-doubt, the existential anxiety where belief and un-belief each occupy space in the psyche of the adept. Nahman's ability to locate human doubt in the metaphysical "empty space" (halal ha-panui) God creates to set the conditions for creation reifies human anxiety as a condition for, and endemic to, creation itself. The questions that are raised in this homily extend from the hermeneutical to the existential, from the kabbalistic to the psychological. For those interested in Jewish heresiology from a psychotheological perspective, this text produces seemingly endless fodder for reflection.

Addendum: When I was a graduate student at the Hebrew University in the 1980s I had the honor of studying with David Flusser. We had an evening seminar and a few of us would walk Professor Flusser to the underground garage where a taxi would take him home. During one of these walks he asked me what I was studying, and I told him Nahman of Bratslav. He said, "Nahman was the only one who truly understood the crisis of human existence (mashber be-hayyim). More than Maimonides, more than Kook, more than anyone." Trying to be clever, I responded, "Do you mean the personal crisis (mashber perati) or the collective crisis (mashber klali)?" He stopped and stared at me and asked, "Are you married?" to which I responded "yes." "Then," he said, "you know that they are both the same thing."

I've taught A. B. Yehoshua's epic novel, Mr. Mani (Mar Mani, 1989) as part of a graduate seminar called Critical Theory and Jewish Studies. In the course we read "primary" theoretical texts from Saussure to Butler, "secondary" texts by Jewish Studies practitioners of these approaches, and a single canonical text, which serves both to anchor the course and acts as a kind of laboratory in which students may perform their own symptomatic readings.

Mar Mani's compositional style makes it both a pleasure and a challenge to teach. The novel opens in the present and unfolds as a counternarrative. As readers move forward in the book, the narrative itself moves back in time, through Palestine and eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth-century to early nineteenth-century Greece. The novel is constructed as a series of one-sided conversations: each long chapter presents what is essentially a monologue, spoken in a particular character's voice and providing in often elliptical fashion crucial details about the Mani family and their fortunes. Finally, each chapter's linguistic style is distinctive to the period in which it is set; thus what begins as broadly vernacular Israeli Hebrew devolves into a pastiche of nineteenth-century nusakh, maskilic fanciful phrasing, and liturgical references.

Mar Mani is absorbing and dizzying in its own right and demands close attention to detail on the level of the individual sentence, as well as the novel's superstructure. At the same time, when systematically examined under the microscope of theory, the novel repeatedly yields new connective fibers. Students finish the course with knowledge of the nuts-and-bolts of theory, but also with a more critical sense of what kind of readers they are, and how this sensibility may be translated into their own scholarship.

If I had been asked this question a few years ago, I might have proposed a throwback course, where the goal is to arrive at a better understanding of a single key work through sustained analysis, where, that is, the key work is itself the topic of the course. But I recently taught a course like this—on Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities—and while the experience was rewarding, I'd like to try something different before repeating it. So then the question becomes: Which text would provide a particularly fruitful way into a topic that I'd like to teach. And the text that comes most readily to mind is Gershom Scholem's diaries. I'm interested in offering a course on German-Jewish culture at the fin of the fin de siècle, and the notebooks that Scholem, who was born in 1897, kept between 1913 and 1919, seem to me to take us into that topic in all kinds of productive ways.

In the first place, of course, the diaries are revealing with respect to Scholem himself, a cultural phenomenon of no small importance. They show that he was still in his teens when he began to formulate the ideas on which his later success would be based, and also that he began to formulate those ideas as rebellious intuitions. More even than his precocious learning, what guided him was the sense that the great German-Jewish historians of the nineteenth century must be, in basic ways, utterly wrong, for they had written in a spirit of compromise and accommodation.

Scholem is anything but a representative figure; yet the dynamic of rebellion and innovation I just described is hardly unique. And for all his extraordinariness, young Scholem could be used as a case study in the mechanisms of productivity among German Jews of the expressionist generation.

But it wasn't only Scholem's mature ideas about historical Judaism that the diaries begin to articulate. What he wrote in them as a teenager often comes close to many of his influential later claims about German-Jewish culture. The diaries abound with arresting commentary about such things as the condition of the acculturated bourgeois Jewish circles in which Scholem grew up, the Zionist circles in which he eventually moved, and how the best German-Jewish artists drew on Jewish tradition, whether they were aware of it or not. Thus the diaries invite reflection on all these aspects of German-Jewish culture, as well as on the continuities between the primary material of German-Jewish culture and the more important secondary accounts of it.

The diaries also contain quite a bit of useful information about the daily lives of Jewish university students, but that may be a topic for another seminar. Because of my space constraints, it is definitely a topic for another day.

I would organize a course on gender and transnational Jewish modernisms centered on Leah Goldberg's 1946 modernist novel Ve-hu ha-or (And That Is the Light). Set in 1932, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Goldberg's novel interrogates the place of Jews in European culture and the place of women in both Jewish and European literary and artistic culture. This metaliterary novel negotiates the social and political backdrop of Jewish life in prewar Europe and engages with a range of literary traditions, including Scandinavian, Anglo-American, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew modernism. The course would investigate these different strands of Goldberg's novel, locating them in the context of her corpus as a whole, including her fascination with Christian imagery, her engagement with European Orientalism, her portrayals of female sexuality and eroticism, her depictions of mental breakdown, and her blend of impressionist and expressionist style. In addition to Goldberg we would read a selection of modernist writers with whom she is in dialogue, both in her prose and her criticism, including Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dovid Bergelson, Yosef Chaim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin. Placing Goldberg in dialogue with various writers and critical traditions, the course aims to rethink the boundaries of Hebrew modernism, looking at its vexed relationship to Anglo-American and European modernist movements. Moreover, we would interrogate how her relationship to all of these traditions is inflected by questions of gender. Another important aim of this course would be to situate Goldberg as a key figure of European intellectual and modernist literary history. To that end, the course would connect her to important Jewish émigré intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt and Erich Auerbach, and to the field of comparative literature more broadly.

The graduate curriculum in my field is so text-centered that I'll probably have many opportunities to teach seminars focused on a Talmudic chapter or the interpretive career of a Biblical passage. The question, however, invites a fantasy; it also invites us to think of a seminar organized around a text but not necessarily a seminar about a text. Taking this opportunity to indulge in a playful counter- factual, I choose Johannes Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judenthum, the notoriously hostile compilation and interpretation of rabbinic texts (or, alternatively, its medieval predecessor, Paris Ms. BNF Lat. 16558). In a real seminar, this text might be taught by an expert on anti-Semitism and it might be studied as an instance of scholarship in the service of hate or oppression. In my counter-factual seminar, fantasized from the privileged situation of what Israel Yuval called "the postpolemical" age, this text will not be studied for itself. It will, rather, supply a canon of Talmudic passages to organize a seminar in which the Talmud is encountered as a provocative, even scandalous text. While the "bizarreness" of the Talmud in Eisenemenger's book is often achieved through distortion or selective quotation, on a disturbing number of occasions we may find ourselves scandalized along with Eisenmenger, experiencing the gap between the late ancient document and the modern scholar (an encyclopedia of anti-Semitism faults Entdecktes Judenthum for "accurate" but opportunistically "literal" readings). It will be a lesson in the Otherness of the Talmud and its causes (is it something in the document itself? in our modern assumptions? in our Christianized assumptions?) and in ways to overcome that Otherness.

AJS Perspectives, in its present incarnation, is pretty close to ideal. With every issue, I look forward to learning a bit about what my colleagues in far-flung fields are working on. I like how the short essays are paired with an engaging image, and I like the formal and aesthetically pleasing pages. I suggest the following addition to make an already rich publication even more appealing and useful: a digital component linked to AJS Perspectives that would be devoted to explicitly addressing broader trends in the Jewish Studies as a whole. This section would be comparable in content to what appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but with a focus on Jewish Studies. I'd like to see AJS members have a place to discuss the rise of MOOCs; diversity and the ever-changing composition of Jewish Studies faculty and the students in our courses; recent moves toward academic boycotts; new possibilities for digital humanities in Jewish studies; the changing role of public and private funding for Jewish Studies programs; trends in financing higher education; and so on. It seems to me that each issue of AJS Perspectives could include a section that would focus on one such issue. A digital component, updated regularly, would include a broader range of perspectives on that same issue, with links to relevant other articles. This digital forum would host news and online conversation about how the featured topic affects our work as researchers and teachers.

I vaguely remember AJS Perspectives arriving in the mail in the past, often with a cover intriguing enough to earn it a spot on my "to-read" pile. But the pile kept growing, and Perspectives kept sinking lower and lower. Somehow, I never did more than flip through a few pages. Spurred by the invitation to comment in this issue, I finally perused several issues from recent years and was pleasantly surprised to see a variety of topics and voices that made for thought-provoking reading. I particularly appreciate the readable articles from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Since I have resolved to actually pay attention to future issues of Perspectives, I would like to focus my own suggestions primarily on form. There are many print publications related to Jewish Studies in one way or another, as my "to-read" pile can attest. But even as digital access to print publications grows, I am not familiar with a forum for Jewish Studies that really takes advantage of digital media in a sustained way. I can imagine a digital Perspectives that would gradually become an interactive resource for research and teaching. What if Perspectives launched moderated conversations related to issue themes and/or individual articles? Invited members to post short blog posts or reflections in between issues? Spearheaded projects using Google Maps and other collaborative platforms? Developed translations and annotations of primary sources or excerpts from key texts? Or simply integrated audio, visual, and audiovisual resources online? Cultivating an online presence takes skill, resources, and time. But in an academic field still dominated by print production, I would be excited to see a new, dynamic, and experimental digital presence in Jewish Studies.

With AJS Perspectives going online, a much broader discussion could be opened that links academic Jewish Studies practitioners with a range of Jewish culture workers, knowledge producers, and interested members of various publics who would make productive interlocutors around subjects of shared concern.

The periodical could grow into a lively venue for Jewish-related "public scholarship," whence ideas incubated in the academy may more easily infuse public debates, and provide Jewish community members and broader audiences new tools for thinking. Further, in accordance with democratizing trends in knowledge production among practitioners of publicly engaged academic work (e.g. through various forms of collaboration), Perspectives could also form an interface for bi-directional learning: a site where nonacademics who often think about and do creative work in domains shared by academics can engage with us.

With web 2.0, the editors could invite nonacademics invested in Jewish issues to pose questions or themes to which scholars could respond; they might also organize forums where scholars, artists, and community practitioners could debate a rich or pressing topic. This would provide a much-needed venue for wide-ranging public debate of critical social and cultural issues, when such space seems to be contracting in the Jewish communal world. Those who work in the Jewish communal sphere—as well as journalists, artists, and other culture workers—can offer "on the ground" views of, or creative approaches to, emergent phenomena, and benefit from academic specialists' contributions of new data, historical depth, comparative contexts, and new frameworks for thinking.

The web will also allow media-rich presentations of research-in-progress, and scholars could be fruitfully stretched in their own practice through invitations to contribute in nontextual ways. Perspectives could maintain an ongoing online gallery of scholars' forays into the production of exhibitions, films, sound recordings, websites, and other media.

I would like to see this beautiful publication continue to become what it is becoming—a venue for new thinking, overlooked topics, and a range of critical perspectives. What I want is to continue to be amazed by topics, scholars, critical approaches, research, and writing about issues I might know little about or topics I care about deeply but have rarely seen addressed in Jewish Studies. I want to see issues that take the next step. I want to imagine the queer issue or the post- postfeminist issue. I want to see Perspectives offer a forum to discuss Jews of color, especially Black Jews, in ways we have yet to do. I want to imagine issues on methods: the ethnography issue, the archive issue, or an issue devoted to sound or dance as Jewish Studies discourses. Closer to my own work I would love to think with colleagues in Jewish Studies more directly about how to talk about transmission as a multivalent thing, memory and disease, tradition and transvaluation. I want more visual culture and more engagement in the world. There are so many topics inspired by what Perspectives has already accomplished, and here are a few ideas for future topics: water; food; pilgrimages; Jewish photographies; theologies otherwise. It might also be great to do a "generations" issue or simply a millennial issue on millennial Jewish Studies and millennial scholars that is about the actors and the work they do, including what the job market portends.

I have long suspected that a significant number of those of us who consider much of our teaching and scholarship to fall at least to some degree within the astonishingly expansive realm known as Jewish Studies are often troubled by the gaps in our own education. And if any of us are ever in a position to retire we will probably seize on the opportunity to sit in on our colleagues' courses and fill those gaps. Some of us who have never been given the opportunity (or felt prepared) to teach an "Introduction to Jewish Studies" course of our own often spend time fantasizing about just what a course would entail. How would we create connections between the multifarious disciplines that make up our field, not to mention its extraordinary range of temporalities and spatialities? So many questions and opportunities would likely ensue! Hence it seems to me that the future incarnations of Perspectives will serve its community well by opening up spaces for dialogue on such questions as: What are the current scholarly arguments/conversations/controversies guiding Jewish Studies scholars who work within Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Folklore, Geography, History, Literary Studies, Rabbinics, Sociology, etc.? How has Jewish identity evolved in changing cultural contexts? What about the boundaries between the Jewish and the non-Jewish over time and space? What do scholars working in such areas most want their colleagues in Jewish Studies to know about their work? What useful paradigms of Jewish life and culture enlivening our research and/or classrooms do we wish our colleagues to know more about? What are the open questions that still challenge us? How better might we ensure that Jewish Studies thrive as a truly integrated (rather than fragmented) community of scholars eager to learn from one another and import and transmit forms of knowledge to one another in ways that transcend our separate niches? And, to paraphrase David Biale in his magisterial inquiry Cultures of the Jews, how might we strive to affirm commonalities between the Jewish past and the Jewish present while still respecting all that is richly different, singular, and strange in those disparate continuums? And returning to that question which has nagged me for some time: what are the ideal Jewish texts to include in a truly interdisciplinary "Introduction to Jewish Studies" course? Finally, in our shared quest to learn from one another (and perhaps find some common ground), Perspectives should reflect the lively debates that stimulate the creative inquiries we conduct within separate disciplines, those that may not yet be fully understood by our colleagues but may one day serve as terrific catalysts for their own work in the classroom and beyond.

I would like Perspectives to continue its focus on emerging issues in the field of Jewish Studies, and to learn from colleagues whose research creates and shapes those questions. At the same time, Jewish Studies is being thrust inexorably into a different type of engagement as the university is, once again, an arena in which political and academic issues are linked, interwoven, and contested. There is no reason to assume that all colleagues affiliated with Jewish Studies view these issues similarly, and there may be variations among us. However, Perspectives is in a position to open conversations about academic boycotts, how Jewish Studies intersects with Israel Studies, and how to engage these issues as they emerge. Many of our colleagues are confident about precisely how to respond. But many other colleagues also feel unable to find a language that emphasizes complexity in the face of jagged polarizations. This timely and powerful publication might be just the space to begin complicated and exceptionally important conversations. These issues will inspire not only campus activism, but scholarship and teaching. These pages, digital or print, should be part of our own work to address this moment and those that lie ahead.

In a somewhat traditional sense, I see a continued role of AJS Perspectives as a reflection of the professional organization that represents our interests and serves our professional needs as scholars of Jewish Studies. I would like AJS Perspectives to be a vehicle for keeping up with developments across the breadth of Jewish Studies, especially for keeping up with developments in subfields other than my own, and for wider issues that connect with the work we do as scholars. That doesn't mean Perspectives needs to be a newsletter as such. Facebook, H-Net, blogs, and websites are enough for up-to-date (even up-to-the-minute) news and announcements of funding opportunities, new academic programs, job listings, calls for papers, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum from fast-breaking to "slow-cooked": AJS Review and a host of other journals deliver excellent peer-reviewed original scholarship in the broad field of Jewish Studies, as well as book reviews and review essays. Ideally, Perspectives finds its niche somewhere in the middle, with articles falling into several (somewhat overlapping) categories:

(1) Reports on new and emerging subfields or scholarly conversations, pointing the interested reader to new resources and new conversation partners. Such reports would combine elements of review essays but need not limit themselves to already published material.

(2) Reports on new academic initiatives and projects. These reports can go beyond press release language toward more in-depth discussion and situate new projects within the broader scholarly landscape.

(3) Digests of new scholarship, especially abstracts of articles appearing in disciplinary journals or journals "outside" of Jewish Studies.

(4) Articles reporting on trends in academia, K-12 Jewish or general education, Jewish adult education, or rabbinical/ professional/communal education that affect (or could affect) the way we do our work as scholars and teachers of Jewish Studies.

(5) Articles reporting on "best practices" in Jewish Studies programs, department management, graduate or undergraduate education, or scholarly praxis.

Perspectives will face interesting challenges as it moves to an online format. As we saw by the small number of Twitter posts related to the 2013 conference, many AJS members (including myself) haven't yet embraced many of the new forms of information technology. While the online version of Perspectives might not fully replace the paper magazine, a major task is to create a website that will be of continual interest to readers, as opposed to simply a place where members can read the issue when it released twice a year.

I'd be interested in seeing Perspectives become a hub for discussions, information, and resources related to Jewish Studies more broadly and not restricted to AJS members only. This might mean taking some of the content that is currently on the AJS website and moving it to Perspectives online. For example, the online version could have job postings, fellowship and grant information, and research opportunities. It might also include moderated forums that would allow members to have genuine conversations with one another about the published articles in Perspectives as well as other topics within Jewish Studies. Perhaps discussions that began at the annual conference could be continued in the online forums. There could be conversations about recent books, articles, films, music, and exhibitions, as well as on career development, graduate programs, politics, teaching strategies, and so on.

Perspectives online could contain links to H-Net reviews and feature invited blogs. It could provide links to news stories related to Jewish Studies from around the web.

Such features would make the online site a place to visit Perspectives more than twice a year when the new edition of the magazine appears, and would highlight the continuing relevance of our field.

More and more I think about the changing contour of the North American university and how my generation—which earned its doctorates in the early 1980s—has enjoyed privileges, work rhythms, institutional frameworks (e.g. bookstores, newspaper book review sections featuring academic titles, the promise of tenure) now either in flux, or in some instances already relics. What does it mean for those of us who train PhD students to do what it is that we do and properly prepare them for the future when what this future looks like is—more than ever—a moving target?

Of course, there was a considerable chasm between the world our academic mentors lived in for the bulk of their careers and the one that we entered, at just the moment when Jewish Studies as a field came of age, situating itself in nearly every major university, establishing beachheads at so many of the university presses, etc. (I recall my Jewish History mentor Amos Funkenstein telling me that when interviewed for his position at UCLA in the 1970s he was never brought for a campus interview and asked only about his views on Freud and Jung; for years, before a job interview I found myself reaching for a volume of Freud the night before.) Still, today's uncertainties regarding matters so basic as the viability of the academic monograph and its role in tenure and promotion, the challenge of distance learning, the future of the classroom lecture, the shrinkage of tenure prospects cut to the bone; they make one uneasy about what it means to mentor today for tomorrow.

Perspectives would be well to highlight these looming dilemmas, to air them not because what we're likely to face in the future is imminent decline but rather change at a pace more rapid than most of us have ever encountered.

I’ve been going to the AJS conference just about every year for the past twenty years. I keep coming back for the small venue and intimate scale. If you go for long enough, you get to know everyone. Year in and out, you run into her, him, or them in the lobby, on a panel, at the hotel bar, or wandering around the book exhibit. The proximity makes for a sense of community-citizenship and close bonds of scholarly-human fellowship, which I think is special to a forum like the AJS conference with its parochial character, and which makes the conference precious. What would be an ideal conference? One where I get to see my friends, meet colleagues, make new friends, and hear something new. Not the same old lines of analysis that I’ve heard over and over, but something, anything, that I’ve never heard before, at least not at the AJS conference, some kind of intellectual connection that might force me to rethink the study of the Jews and Judaism, the human condition, in some new light, from a skewed perspective and larger frame.

As an anthropologist, I find it very exciting to share my ethnographic and theoretical work with scholars from a range of disciplines who might not normally come across it. This is, in part, why I have enjoyed attending AJS conferences. Over the past several years I have delivered papers at AJS’s annual meeting on organized panels spanning a diverse range of topics: Jewish music; the economics of Jewish education; mysticism and spirituality; Israeli culture and nationalism; and Mizrahi pop culture. This has meant gaining perspectives and feedback from scholars who view issues from diverse vantage points and methodologies, and I know that this has enriched my research. I believe AJS could do more to facilitate such important interactions. Perhaps AJS could encourage a
formalized “speed-dating” type of academic networking during a reception, where attendees might meet a range of scholars over hors d’oeuvres; these brief interactions
would likely lead to new collaborations.

At the same time, it is very important for the more specialized caucuses to have a
space to meet. My ideal AJS conference would also offer a forum/meeting for scholars who
examine contemporary cultural studies (such as anthropologists, sociologists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and scholars of film, dance, and literature). We—who study the very recent past and present—are a small minority at AJS, and it would be wonderful to have an opportunity to discuss our work and shared theoretical interests and concerns.

In short, the ideal AJS conference would provide attendees with more opportunities for interaction and exchange beyond our disciplinary boundaries while also allowing further communication and connection with scholars in our own specialized fields.

Finally, I feel a responsibility to voice what so many of us feel: if we continue to meet at the beginning of winter vacation, why not occasionally hold the meetings in sunny Florida? Laura Levitt and David Shneer’s annual AJS party could only be improved if folks were sipping margaritas with an ocean-side view.

Thinking about my ideal AJS conference, I face a pleasant challenge: there isn’t much I would change or add. I came to Jewish Studies after a midcareer reorientation from the history of modern art to Jewish visual culture, modern and contemporary. From my first AJS conference in December 2000, I knew I had found my way home. But what makes the annual conference better or more effective than other scholarly meetings? Well, the AJS conference is relatively small and heimish (I hope not clannish), and that suits me fine. Even though our annual breakfast is at 7:00 a.m., I really value the wonderful work of the Women’s Caucus. I do a lot of schmoozing with what I think of as “the-only-Jewish-community-where-I feel-at-home”; as a secular Jewish woman, it’s my ideal beit midrash.

Still, with schmoozing and committee meetings, I get to fewer sessions than I’d like. I’m not sure how to resolve this embarrassment of riches. I’m looking forward to this year’s new program formats—the seminars, in particular. I love the idea of precirculated or posted papers from a group of scholars, more discussion, and lengthened or multiple timeslots. I’m concerned, though, that this might be an elite conversation; I’d really enjoy a more open seminar discussion with a fixed number of participants—maybe twenty to thirty—who sign on in advance, study the work, and bring prepared voices to the discussion. Digital projects are important teaching and research tools for me. I’d like to learn about them in the more intimate setting of a scheduled display booth encounter, much like the book display, rather than using up dedicated session slots. Finally, I ‘d love to attend an annual session devoted to “second thoughts,” in which senior scholars think aloud about the changes, revisions, and vagaries of their earlier scholarship. It would be part methodology, part experience, and a view of how our intellectual practice works.

The AJS conference is a great intellectual and community gathering. Can’t wait till December!

The heart of the AJS conference lies in the hallways, conference rooms, and cafés of the hotel. My ideal AJS conference would involve finding myself listening to a panel that may not be directly associated with my area of work, but piques my interest methodologically or because of the eclectic and unexpected composition of the panel. I too am guilty of organizing panels around a specific topic. And yet I find the most thought-provoking panels are those that are bound together around a methodological question or debate. Having said that, some of the most rewarding intellectual exchanges and moments of professional development flow through the conversations that take place away from the panels, in the hallways and coffee shops of the hotel. The majority of AJS conference participants use the conference as an opportunity to catch up with old friends and informally meet senior scholars who can help guide their professional paths. An ideal conference could find a way to formalize those types of conversations—through mentoring sessions and programs; informal interest group meetings based on subfields (French Jewish history, for instance) where scholars can exchange ideas, archival knowledge, and learn about developing research projects; sponsored social functions for faculty with shared social and professional experiences such as untenured faculty, faculty at large state institutions, or those working at universities with large Jewish populations; and, finally, more working groups based on research fields that are scheduled during prime conference time. Having recently moved from the rich Jewish Studies community of New York to the significantly smaller (yet vibrant) one of Melbourne, ultimately the most rewarding AJS conferences allow me to reconnect with a supportive and energetic academic community.