Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction David N. Myers One of the distinctive features of the Jewish Quarterly Review over the past seventeen years—from the time that the brilliant and dearly departed Elliott Horowitz and I became coeditors—has been our reliance on the mode of the forum to debate, revisit, and probe. Our first forum in volume 94 in 2004 brought together a diverse trio of scholars, Robert Bonfil, Gavriel Rosenfeld, and Sister Carol Rittner, to analyze Daniel Gold-hagen’s book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. Their critical and often sharp reflections inaugurated a new tradition and created a place of honor for the forum in JQR. Since that time, we have taken up many trends, themes, books, and scholars in our fora; they allow for more supple and compact engagement with scholarship in the field of Jewish studies than our formidable articles. In the last few issues, we have begun to utilize the forum as a means of exploring the wide world of Jewish studies scholarship in different geo-cultural settings. There is a certain ambiguity in our formulation that, in all honesty, we were not fully mindful of initially. That is, we did not clarify whether we meant scholarship produced in or about those distinct geo-cultural settings. The fact is that we mean both. We are interested in how a particular space within the wider field of Jewish history has been represented in scholarship. And we are interested, as Marcin Wodziński exemplifies in his bibliometric essay on Eastern European Jewish scholarship in this issue, where and by whom research in a given area is produced. This kind of exercise, we hope, can shed light both on the subjects and on the objects of research in the field of Jewish studies. The kinds of reflections we invite vary in scope and disposition, ranging from the “micro” to the “macro” and even on to the “meta.” Our first such forum in JQR 111.1 (Fall 2021) explored Jewish studies and cultural production in [End Page 215] Latin America by asking seven scholars to choose a character from the past who illuminated their own research paths. The present forum pivots to Eastern Europe, home to what was the world’s largest population of Jews until the Holocaust. As such, Eastern Europe was the site of extraordinary scholarly and cultural creativity in a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Among the devastating losses of the Nazi genocidal assault was the eradication of this remarkable space of multilingual creativity. Recent decades have seen two important developments that animate the authors in this forum: the reemergence of Jewish studies scholarship in Russia and Poland—stimulated by often heroic individuals who emerged from the shadows of Communism—and growing post-Communist contestation and dispute over the sites of memory on which Jews lived and created. The call to forum contributors asked them to address in concise fashion an important moment, piece of scholarship, or personality that has been important to this field of research. The first group of essays takes up a diverse group of key Eastern European personalities covering over a century. Israel Bartal reaches back to a foundational figure of the early twentieth-century, Simon Dubnov, and examines the surprising reception and afterlife of the historian and Autonomist in the Zionist worlds of Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel. Ellie Schainker excavates the fascinating story of master archivist Benyamin Lukin, who played a central role in unearthing critical sources related to Russian Jewish history already in pre-1989 Leningrad, later in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, and finally in Jerusalem as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People. Benjamin Nathans offers a touching tribute to a dear Russian friend and mentor, Viktor Yefimovich Kelner, who, after 1989, abandoned the study of British labor history to devote himself to building up an archive of Russian Jewish history, which he himself began to study and master; Kelner’s biography of Dubnov remains one of the best studies ever written...