Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries.

Avriel Bar-Levav is associate professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. He is also head of the Center for the Study of the Relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims and co-editor of Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture. His fields of study include history of the Jewish book, Jewish attitudes toward death, ego documents, and Jewish ethical literature.
Uzi Rebhun is professor and head of the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds the Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-diaspora relations. His fields of study include Jewish demography, Jewish sociology, and Israel-Diaspora relations.

• Symposium


• Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures


• Avriel Bar-Levav, Library Awareness and Textual Intimacy in Contemporary Jewish Culture


• Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Digital Research of Jewish Texts: Challenges and Opportunities


• Yaniv Hagbi, Textual Transmission as Textual Participation: The Case of Materialism in S.Y. Agnon's Perception of Language


• Jan Schwarz, The Lost Souls of Meshugah: Textual Transmission of Isaac Bashevis Singer's World Literature


• Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish Publishing in the Soviet Union, 1953-1991


• Andreas Lehnardt, The Discovery and Recovery of Hebrew Manuscripts: The Case of Germany


• Edwin Seroussi, The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment


• Ido Ramati, Media in the Dissemination of Land of Israel Songs


• Guy Bracha, Digitization of Jewish Nahda Texts: "Knowing the Enemy" or Preserving a Heritage?


• Yigal S. Nizri, "Fit to Sacrifice on the Altar of Print": Approbation Letters and the Printing of 19th-Century Moroccan Halakhic Books


• Arndt Engelhardt, Transferring Jewish Knowledge: F.A. Brockhaus as a Publisher of Judaica and Orientalia


• Dan Tsahor, Knowledge and the Making of a Jewish Nation: Encyclopedia, Historical Narrative, and the Origins of Jewish Nationalism


• Essay


• Adi Livny, Fighting Partition, Saving Mount Scopus: The Pragmatic Binationalism of D.W. Senator (1930-1949)


• Book Reviews (arranged by subject)


• Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide


• Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (eds.), Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades, Sean Martin


• Eugene M. Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and Robert Weinberg (eds.), Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond, David Biale


• Batya Brutin, Hayerushah: hashoah biytzirotehem shel omanim yisreelim benei hador hasheni (The Inheritance: The Holocaust in the Artworks of Second Generation Israeli Artists), Tamara Abramovitch


• Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, Samuel Barnai


• Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, Zvi Gitelman


• Amir Goldstein, Derekh rabat panim: tziyonuto shel Zeev Jabotinsky lenokhah haantishemiyut (Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Thought and Action of Ze'ev Jabotinsky), Avi Shilon


• Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York, Sergio DellaPergola


• Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion


• Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction, Nancy Sinkoff


• Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion, Michael Roubach


• Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy, Paul Mendes-Flohr


• Edna Nahshon (ed.), New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway, Vassili Schedrin


• Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Naomi Mandel


• Jeffrey Summit, Singing God's Word: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism, Sonja K. Pilz


• History, Biography, and Social Science


• Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877-1935, Diana L. Linden


• Matthew Baigell, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880-1940, Diana L. Linden


• Ido Bassok, Tehiyat hane'urim: mishpahah vehinukh beyahadut polin bein milhamot ha'olam (Revival of Youth: Family and Education among Interwar Polish Jewry), Samuel D. Kassow


• Shannon L. Fogg, Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947, Renée Poznanski


• Zvi Gitelman (ed.), The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany, Larissa Remennick


• Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung, Samuel Heilman


• Kamil Kijek, Dzieci Modernizmu: Swiadomosc, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna mlodziezy zydowskiej w II Rzeczpospolitej (Children of Modernism: The Consciousness Culture and Political Socialization of Jewish Youth in the Second Polish Republic), Samuel D. Kassow


• Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (eds.), Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, Harvey E. Goldberg


• Ber Kotlerman, Broken Heart/Broken Wholeness: The Post-Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister, Mikhail Krutikov


• Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (eds.), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, Shulamit Volkov


• Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History, Jeffrey S. Gurock


• Vladimir Levin, Mimahpekhah lemilhamah: hapolitikah hayehudit berusiyah, 1907-1914, (From Revolution to War: Jewish Politics in Russia, 1907-1914), Brian Horowitz


• Jacob Jay Lindenthal, Abi Gezunt: Explorations into the Role of Health and the American Jewish Dream, together with The Lindex: A Companion to Abi Gezunt, Gil Riback


• Sean Martin, For the Good of the Nation: Institutions for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland: A Documentary History, Shaul Stampfer


• Uzi Rebhun, Jews and the American Religious Landscape, Yaakov Ariel


• Jacques Roumani, David Meghnagi, and Judith Roumani (eds.), Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image, Emanuela Trevisan Semi


• Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews, Michael R. Marrus


• Mel Scult (ed.), Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, vol. 2, 1934-1941, Noam Pianko


• Jeffrey Veidlinger (ed.), Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, Dani Schrire


• Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East


• Tal Dekel, Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel, Lynne Swarts


• Michael Feige, 'Al da'at hamakom: mehozot zikaron yisreelim (Al Da'at Ha'makom: Israeli Realms of Memory), ed. David Ohana, Edna Lomsky-Feder


• Yaron Harel, Damesek nikhbeshah zemanit: hatziyonut beDamesek 1908-1923, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman


• Yaron Harel, Zionism in Damascus: Ideology and Activity in the Jewish Community at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, trans. D. Gershon Lewental, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman


• Dana Hercbergs, Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem, Menachem Klein


• Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, Yair Wallach


• Michal Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel, Harvey E. Goldberg


• Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism, Joseph Heller


• Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron, Joseph Heller


• Tamar Wolf-Monzon, Bahir vegavohah kezemer:Ya'akov Orland: poetikah, historiyah, tarbut. (Ya'acov Orland: Poetics, History, Culture), Jehoash Hirshberg


• Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXXII


• Note on Editorial Policy