As the incoming editors of the AJS Review, we are deeply honored to serve the profession in this capacity. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our predecessors, Christine Hayes and Magda Teter, for their unstinting commitment to ensuring the highest standards of excellence. Under their leadership and guidance, the journal has flourished, and their work is on display in this issue as they supervised the acquisition, peer review, and editing of the articles. We are also grateful to them for allowing us to shadow their activities for the last few months and for their advice and encouragement in this transition.
We are grateful to the managing editor, Aviva Arad, whose extraordinary work makes publication possible. We also want to express our appreciation to Miriam Bodian, who served as book review editor until last fall, and to thank the new book review editors, Francesca Bregoli, Jay Geller, and Joel S. Kaminsky, for their hard work in ensuring that our book review section is lively, rich, and enlightening. We also thank Cambridge University Press and their production, marketing, and distribution teams for turning scholarly work into a usable and attractive product. We also want to thank the Association for Jewish Studies, led by Pamela Nadell, president; Jonathan Sarna, immediate past president; and Rona Sheramy, executive director, not only for their support for the journal but for their trust in us as the new stewards of this important publication.
We hope to follow the path paved over the past forty years: to publish high-quality, cutting-edge scholarship across all areas of Jewish studies, including original articles and critical reviews of important books in the field. AJS Review offers a place for specialized conversation within subfields, and at the same time creates a venue for interdisciplinary conversation across the wider field of Jewish studies. Defining that field and its boundaries remains a messy and contentious business. But for the many of us who see value in continuing to engage with a notion of “Jewish” as a useful category of analysis across place and time, across text and context, AJS Review is an important arena for carrying on that work.
We invite you to send us review essays and other kinds of “think pieces” that engage with methodological and theoretical issues. We welcome discussion of linked clusters of articles that bring attention to themes or topics that cross time periods or disciplines.
A scholarly journal is not only a forum for publication but a partnership. To that end, we turn to you and invite you to contribute to maintaining the AJS Review’s caliber of excellence and its vital role in the field, by submitting articles or agreeing to review articles and books when asked. We look forward to working with the editorial team, with the contributors and reviewers, and with you to make sure that AJS Review continues to be central to the scholarly and intellectual conversation in Jewish studies.
