We begin this first issue of 2022, volume 42, with tributes to three of our colleagues who passed away in the last months of 2021. Professor Dianne Ashton was a close friend and colleague of mine at Rowan University, who collaborated with me and Professor Melissa Klapper to set up the fledgling Jewish Studies Program (minor and certificate of undergraduate study) at Rowan University, who edited the prestigious American Jewish History journal for 6 years (mentoring me as I began my current editor position), and whose achievements in women’s history and spirituality, as well the development of American ritual, were exceptional contributions. Her untimely passing interrupted her project digitizing the letters of the Gratz family, and more. Her colleague Ellen Umansky pays tribute to her lifetime achievements in her tribute to Dianne. My personal condolences to her husband Richard Drucker, her daughter and family, her extended family, and all who mourn her passing.

Professor Elihu Katz’s life spanned the USA and Israel for 95 years. I first made his acquaintance in my first year of aliyah, when he was affiliated with the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research in Jerusalem, and he was instrumental in pairing me up to work with Professor Brenda Danet z’l who was also in his field of Communications. This introduced me to working on projects that were relevant to me personally (at that time an NSF-sponsored project on the acculturation of Israeli immigrants to Israeli bureaucracy, a source of “sweat and tears” in my early years of immigration). Elihu’s achievements included involvement in the pioneering effort to establish Israeli TV, later broadened to introducing TV broadcasting to both the UK and third world countries, a follow-up assessment of the impact of TV on Israeli communications, leisure, and culture, and a comparative study of how the popular “Dallas” TV show was received all over the world. He continued to be involved in using his analytical and communication skills for real-world phenomena, demonstrated by a book in collaboration with Daniel Dayan, Media Events, which has been translated all over the world. An epic transnationalist, he shared appointments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Chicago, and later the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, and finally the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, 1992–2021 (Emeritus as of 2014). Recipient of the Israel Prize, UNESCO-Canada McLuhan Prize, and no less than ASSJ’s Marshall Sklare Award in 2005. We include tributes from his former colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Michael X. Delli Carpini, and his former student and colleague, Professor Menahem Blondheim from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My personal condolences to his wife Ruth Katz and all those who mourn his passing.

A founding member of ASSJ and the 1996 Marshall Sklare Award honoree (and 1991 ASSJ Lifetime Achievement honoree), Professor Samuel Z. Klausner also passed away in December 2021, at the age of 98. I have visions of Sam and Elihu enjoying some fond collegial memories of studying contemporary Jewry, as well as their overlapping time at the University of Pennsylvania, where Professor Klausner spent nearly 30 years in the Department of Sociology, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1996. Also a transnationalist, he mastered seven languages, served in both the American and Israeli militaries, and as a clinical psychologist in Israel, taught in Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (and in Arabic at Mansoura University Egypt and Muhammad V University in Morocco), with a broad range of scholarly interests and endeavors, including both Jewish studies and Islam. A former student, mentee, and colleague, Professor Allen (Avi) Glicksman presents in his tribute to Professor Klausner his life of achievement and personal integrity. My personal condolences to Sam’s wife, Professor Roberta Sands, and family, friends, and all who mourn his passing.

And the study of contemporary Jewry survives and develops, as the current issue attests.

We begin with six articles focusing on Israel or Israeli samples. Using survey research they designed, Laura Royden and Eitan Hersh seek to understand the roots of the young American left’s negative views toward Israel. They compare the content of the views of the left with those of the center and the right, and the context within which they fashion their views (what are the “comparison countries” about which the respondents have views). The authors present in detail the survey and sample details, as well as the analysis, allowing the reader to reach their own conclusions of the reliability and validity of the research, and also understand where future research can continue to probe this topic.

Brenda Geiger uses in-depth interviews to probe the integration of a subsection of French immigrants to Israel (students at the Technion University of Technology in Haifa, Israel) as they consciously seek to avoid the more typical “ethnic bubbles” that many French immigrants seek and/or find themselves in upon immigration. Five to 10 years post-aliyah, when the interviews take place, all are fluent in Hebrew and well integrated into Israeli society. While candidly acknowledging the limitations of the research, the author makes a good case for tapping into a subgroup of immigrants to Israel whose strategies for integration have not been well understood, nor their outcomes.

Tanya Zion-Waldoks uses the Israeli case to test some conclusions about the “Jewish Continuity Crisis” that have, in prior research, primarily used North American data. In the Israeli setting, agunah activists served as advocates for women in court cases in which Jewish women are seeking release through divorce from a dysfunctional marriage, but whose husbands have not granted them this writ of divorce. Through intensive case studies of 33 Jewish Orthodox activists, Zion-Waldoks sheds light on how they frame their experiences and motivations as “rescuing” not only the women for whom they advocate, but also the Jewish family more broadly, and its implications for the Jewish people and the Jewish state institutionalizing Judaism. These women see themselves in a unique position to effect change in both religious and civil spheres. The critical and thoughtful research and its analysis and discussion broadens the discourse on the “continuity crisis” to new dimensions related to the Jewish family and beyond the culturally specific contours of North America. For all who have been engaged in this discourse and its ramifications (the majority of American Jews, I would wager), there is much pause for thought in this article, as it reframes the challenges for the Jewish peoplehood writ large.

In their analysis of the Israeli Haredi experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shlomo Black, Itschak Trachtengot, and Gabriel Horenczyk present the results of online questionnaires completed by 259 Haredi participants, showing that the sense of discrimination perceived by Haredim in Israel during the pandemic is directly correlated with “community post-traumatic growth,” including heightened identification with their ultra-Orthodox culture within Israel. That the researchers succeeded in obtaining this size of sample, and their in-depth understandings of the situation, contributes to the study’s significance. The analysis broadens the understanding of post-traumatic growth to include collective identification with the community that has experienced shared trauma, lending itself to explanations of how communities survive strong attacks on their beliefs and ways of life. The results have implications for understanding globally the Haredi experience during the pandemic (not only in Israel), as well as experiences of other minority groups in different situations that serve to threaten group solidarity.

Yuval Arbel also focuses on self-identified ultra-Orthodox in Israel to compare their health, primarily measured by obesity, as indicated by BMI, with self-identified secular Israeli Jews, using data from a national longitudinal survey conducted from 2012 to 2016 by the Israeli Bureau of Statistics. A comprehensive review of the literature on religiosity and health lays the foundation for significance of the analysis presented and its public policy implications. Ultra-Orthodox adult men are considered to be at a greater risk of obesity than secular adult men, in contrast to similar comparisons of women. These gender differences in the results are discussed, both in terms of their contrast to previous research and public policy implications.

Using interviews with 23 individuals who had disaffiliated from their former Haredi communities in Israel, Ronit Pinchas-Mizrachi and Baruch Velan study the challenges these individuals experience in accessing healthcare, from the practical adjustments to seeking healthcare outside their former communities and without their family’s active support, to more psychological hurdles encountered as a result of transitioning to a new sociocultural environment, akin to immigration. The findings have implications beyond the specific Israeli subgroup in question, to other individuals who are experiencing the demanding process of sociocultural transition.

Changing gears, but not entirely, Ilana Webster-Kogen focuses on Moroccan Torah Scrolls as they experience sociocultural transition. Using an ethnographically informed analysis of Torah scrolls primarily in Israel, Morocco, and England, Webster-Kogen demonstrates the role that such scrolls play in each of these communities by facilitating a thorough understanding of the migration networks informing these communities. The historical contexts of each location, immigration processes experienced, as well as the current places and uses of each scroll, present a fascinating analysis of material objects as actors and performers in the current (as well as historical) culture.

We conclude with an exploration of the “echoes of antisemitism” in Colombia from 1945 to 1948; “echoes” because they were reflected and transformed by what was happening in other countries both in the region and globally at the time, demonstrating for us how intertwined historical contexts can be, and how transnational influences are carried by many different mediums and with different impacts in different contexts. Given the most recent special issue of Contemporary Jewry on “Jews in the Americas…,” with its special emphasis on transnational perspectives, this analysis certainly continues this transnational orientation to help enlighten the experience of minority Jewish communities in Colombia post-World War II.

Together, these articles represent a wide methodological spectrum of social science, from original survey research to secondary analysis of broad national surveys, in-depth qualitative interviews, ethnographic analysis of material cultural objects, and sociohistorical analysis, demonstrating the relative contributions each of these approaches offers and the complementary strengths and limitations of each particular approach. And while the majority of the settings of this issue’s research are Israeli, they are used for very different purposes: as objects of diasporic attitudes; to enlighten discourse on the widely shared problem of Jewish continuity; and to use the Israeli government’s survey resources that enable better understanding of ultra-Orthodox experiences, whether it be of a public health pandemic or recommended public health policies, or the insight derived from multivariate analysis that enables teasing out gendered interactions with religiosity). Whatever your particular interests and passions, I hope you will be engaged by something, if not everything, in this current selection of articles.

Contemporary Jewry is in transition to a new book review editor, as you’ll read in the issue. If you’d like to be involved in the review process, please don’t hesitate to contact Daniel Ross Goodman (danielrgoodmanesq@gmail.com) and volunteer as a reviewer, or send your own book to his attention. Likewise, don’t hesitate to inform Helen Kim of the research you are involved in and have your research updates publicized in the journal.