Jewish Social Studies

When we agreed to assume the editorial responsibilities for Jewish Social Studies, the world did not look like it does now. For many of us, the past months have been a strange haze of sheltering-in-place, masked trips to the grocery store, the careful watching of charts and heat maps in the news, the shuffling of childcare and work responsibilities, and concern for the health of ourselves and our communities. For others, the pandemic has been more disruptive still, including those who risk daily exposure through work or for lack of safe shelter. A growing number of us, including our students, colleagues, friends, and family, have contracted COVID-19. The long-term effects of this unfolding crisis on each of us and society as a whole remain uncertain, but the sense that we are experiencing seismic shifts that will irreversibly remake our once familiar landscapes strengthens by the day.

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. (There is something truly unprecedented in the fact that in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest of political repression and racism, from Hong Kong to Minsk to Kenosha, Wisconsin.) Amidst all of this, [End Page 5] the pandemic has coincided with the revival of antisemitic campaigns and violence against Jews in various parts of the world.

When Jewish Social Studies debuted in January 1939, the world also felt profoundly unstable. 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. Together, they had created the Conference to lend the insights and approaches of social science to the study of world Jewry, with the explicit aim of bringing attention to the plight of Jews and, in the process, to the challenges posed by rising intolerance around the world. As Cohen recalled in his autobiography, "One of the first problems to which we turned was the problem of bringing before the world's conscience the character and dimensions of the German assault upon Jewish, and therefore upon human, rights."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."⁴ We may be less sanguine about claims to absolute accuracy and science than our predecessors were, but we remain committed to facilitating the production of exacting scholarship at a time in which misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories—both about Jews and various others—abound.

Though different than those of the 1930s, today's circumstances echo some of those that helped bring Jewish Social Studies into being. Like Baron, Cohen, and Kohn, we are confronted by challenges that are global in scale. We share their sense of...