The Jewish Studies Collection welcomes narratives, life stories, ethnographies, and other ways of “telling” that describe Jewish lived experience in the context of identity and place. This collection is guided by the belief that story-sharing, delivered by subject-matter experts, can shorten the distance that separates us and increase our collective understanding so that we can stand against thinking and policies that exclude people for simply being who they are.

By “lived places” this collection means much more than geographical or physical locations, but also social and institutional spaces where identity is expressed and often contested. The question of the place of Jews, the territorial and national belonging of the Jewish people is both an ancient and a deeply contemporary topic. Ashkenazi Jews, Arab-Jews, Sephardim, Mizrahim, and so many other subcategories are an example of the attempt to grasp and simplify the complexity of Jewish belonging. This collection is committed to representing this complexity mainly, but not exclusively, in the following fronts: migrations and diasporas, transmission of family narratives, life in Israel, and women’s experiences.

Jewish identity acquires a very different meaning in colonial Iraq, in independent Algeria, in a development town in Israel, in an ultraorthodox neighborhood in New York or in a settlement in the West Bank. Likewise, the meaning and implications of being Jewish are worlds apart depending on whether one is a Mizrahi woman in a development town, a Holocaust survivor in Jerusalem, the child of Moroccan migrants in Beersheva, a religious feminist in a Sephardi community, a Yemenite grandmother in Southern Tel Aviv, an Arab-Israeli in East Jerusalem, or a settler in the West Bank. The Jewish Studies collection of Lived Places welcomes submissions from researchers, activists and/or individuals interested in making these experiences accessible for educational institutions to help understand the complexity and diversity of the contemporary Jewish experience.

For seasoned writers, my role as collection editor will be that of occasional progress-checker, deadline-reminder, and draft reader. For first-time writers, my role will be that of co-strategist, frequent draft commentator, and general encourager. For those in-between, we will come up with an arrangement that will permit authorial freedom and editorial feedback.