Jewish Studies

Editor in Chief | Area Editors | Articles and Contributors

The field of Jewish studies is broad and interdisciplinary, encompassing history, religion, philosophy, literature, sociology and political science. Its chronological and geographical range is immense, stretching from the Bible to the present and including communities from the Americas to Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Africa. Given the diversity of Jewish culture, it is extraordinarily difficult for students and scholars to stay informed about such a wide diversity of sources. With advances in online searching and database technologies, researchers can easily access library catalogs, bibliographic indexes, and other lists that show thousands of resources that might also be useful to them. But how can the researcher, no matter at what level, filter through the proliferation of information to identify what is reliable and directly relevant to their inquiries? What is needed now, more than ever, is expert guidance. This is what Oxford Bibliographies Jewish Studies offers through its carefully selected articles that break down subject areas into their component parts and pithy annotations that summarize the main contribution of each citation.

The complexities of the field of Jewish Studies posed significant challenges to the formation of these bibliographies. For example, should the article on Modern Jewish Artists attempt to cover all artists of Jewish origin or only those whose art contains Jewish themes? Should an article on, say, food include traditional religious works or only modern scholarly literature? How should the articles balance the need to cover a whole subject while not overwhelming the reader with too many citations? In general, the solutions to these problems were dictated by Oxford Bibliographies Jewish Studies’ vision of its users who seek tightly focused, academically sound guidance for further reading and research.

 

Editor in Chief Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. She has published five books, including In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages (Stanford University Press, 2024).

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DIGITAL MEDIA

View a lively discussion with Naomi Seidman, Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, as she discusses her involvement with the project and the importance of Oxford Bibliographies to students and researchers worldwide.

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FOUNDING EDITOR IN CHIEF

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AREA EDITORS

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GUEST EDITOR

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FORMER STANDING EDITORIAL BOARD

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FOUNDING EDITORIAL BOARD

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ARTICLES AND CONTRIBUTORS

* = recently published

Anthropology, Sociology, Folklore, Cultural Studies

Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Studies

Area (Regional) Studies

Bible

Judaism in the Ancient World

Language, Literature and the Arts

Philosophy and Thought

Rabbinics

Religion and Law

Zionism and Israel