Jewish Studies in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The present crisis brought on by the "novel coronavirus" has arrived alongside other, less novel crises: the rise in ethnonationalism and repressive authoritarian regimes, increasing wealth disparities, human rights violations, a global refugee crisis, the ever-more apparent threats posed by climate change, and a growing awakening to the depth and complexities of racism and race-based violence, and to sexism and gender-based violence in the United States and beyond On the first page of the journal's first issue, Morris Raphael Cohen, one of its founding editors, tried to put the historical moment and the significance of the undertaking into context: [T]he friends of liberal democracy are beginning to realize that the gains of humane civilization, achieved at so much cost in the struggle of the ages, are threatened by the confessedly fanatic war of extermination against the Jews, since that is but a part of the war against all minorities and against all lovers of liberty of thought and conscience who cannot be regimented into the goose-stepping way of life 1 The journal, he hoped, would extend the work of the Conference on Jewish Relations, which he had founded a few years earlier with Salo Wittmayer Baron "2 With Hans Kohn, Cohen and Baron launched Jewish Social Studies to be a regular outlet for the work of the Conference 3 An early prospectus for the journal explained its rationale: "With the growing complexity and increasing importance of Jewish problems in the world in general and in the United States in particular, it has become a matter of the utmost necessity to have accurate and scientific information and interpretation concerning Jewish questions Similar patterns obtained in the realm of publishing: when Baron, Cohen, and Kohn joined forces to launch JSS in 1939, the number ofjournals dedicated to the scholarly study of Jewish subjects was much smaller than it is today 6 (Among the few such journals published in Europe during this time, those in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe soon either closed their doors or relocated to the United States 7) The locales in which Jewish Studies was pursued were also more constrained: in the years before the Second World War, as Jewish Studies was slowly taking root in the US and Palestine, Europe still held a significant gravitational pull