What would you like Perspectives to be?

Laura S. Levitt

Temple University

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.