Gentle Reader,
Future historians will see the date of our new issue—Volume 108, #4, October 2024—as ahead of its time. Let the record show that we’re introducing this issue in May 2026. Our publisher informs us that rushing ahead to the present may be too hasty; and how could we disagree, given the developments of the past two years? Instead, we put those matters into the hands of future historians. (By the way, anyone want to succeed us as editors? We here there’s an opening at the start of 2027…)
Our retro-dating system also makes us wonderfully responsive to Eli Lederhendler’s May 2024 Lee Max Friedman address, which we published in our July 2024 issue. Now, just a few months later, a vibrant, provocative, and eloquent septet of invited scholars offers responses and dialogue. See what Lila C. Berman, Devin Naar, Britt Tevis, Kate Rosenblatt, Derek Penslar, Shaul Magid, and Jack Wertheimer have to say about the future of our field, along with Lederhendler’s closing words. Reader, here is scholarly debate at its best: rich, multilayered, and nuanced, with rhetorical flourishes and lots of dramatic tension. Each speaks to the challenges our field faces in an uncertain and complex world, and offers prescriptions for the next steps in American Jewish history. And, it arrives just in time for the next Lee Max Friedman address!
Before you get there, however, two historical case studies on US-Israel relations await you.
Ori Yehudai explores how American Jews framed attacks on Israel in the 1970s, especially in Ma’alot and Kiryat Shmona, through the historical lens of Jewish victimization, even as Israel had also decisively shown its military might—a perspective that also allows us to think about the terms we’ve used to describe conflict in the region in subsequent cycles.
Poetically, the last scholar that Yehudai cites, Geoffrey Levin, authored the next essay: an introduction to several 1950s documents produced by the anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism, including a fascinating piece by Israeli “contrarian journalist” Uri Avnery titled “Zionism, Inc.” Levin curates these materials partly to show how Zionism had captured the imagination of American Jewry in the 1950s—well before the more conventional date of 1967. While Avnery’s position was controversial to be sure, it also gives us a broader sense, through Levin’s presentation, of the range of conversation American and Israeli Jews had around efforts to promote and support Israel in the nation’s early years.
To see more perspectives, you can also read Theodore Sasson’s review essay of recent books on America and Zionism (including Levin’s book, which makes the trifecta for him).
Seven more reviews cover the latest in our field. Look, reader: while the book is the best way to understand each author’s point of view, these reviews are far better than anything you can pull from AI summaries. Our journal, and our society, promotes scholarship as emerging through dialogue, and in these pages, whether in long or short form, you see our core principles at work.
You can also see these principles at work in our Scholars Conference—in CLEVELAND, OHIO—next week. Go and learn!
Wishing you all an endless summer—
Marni, Jessica, and Judah.
