“The World with Us in It”—Debra Kaufman’s Research and Wisdom

I am honored to head the ceremony of the Marshall Sklare Award bestowed to Prof. Debra Renée Kaufman by a community that respects and praises her work. Recognizing her innovative, critical, and multilevel relevant intellectual contribution to our field/s, we cherish the diversity of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives that frame her work and our study of contemporary Jewry. Indeed, this is a field built by creative knowledge, for which our association aims to provide the underpinnings of a collaborative space and enhances our identity as an epistemic community. Debra Kaufman devoted her academic career to building conceptual research and existential bridges between themes, problems, and disciplines. She conceived agency and consciousness as serious and committed tools to challenge the inclusion/exclusion dynamics that characterize both knowledge structures and the social world. She is Professor Emerita and Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University; Debra has been a central and prominent voice in Sociology, Feminist Studies, and Jewish Studies over fruitful decades and today’s continuous and systematic work. Her research represents a critical contribution to shaping and broadening the field of feminist Studies and Jewish Studies. Debra’s relevance is due not only to her professional research and scholarship as a noted sociologist, but also through her sustained leadership as the founding Director of the Women’s Studies (now Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program), as one of the founding members of the Graduate Consortium of Women’s Studies in Boston, and as one of the founding directors of the Jewish Studies program at Northeastern University. She shared her knowledge and expanded her presence as a visiting professor in prestigious international universities and a guest lecturer worldwide. Special attention deserves her presence at Frei University in Germany, where she presented her research that would become articles and edited books on the place of the Holocaust

I am honored to head the ceremony of the Marshall Sklare Award bestowed to Prof. Debra Renée Kaufman by a community that respects and praises her work. Recognizing her innovative, critical, and multilevel relevant intellectual contribution to our field/s, we cherish the diversity of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives that frame her work and our study of contemporary Jewry. Indeed, this is a field built by creative knowledge, for which our association aims to provide the underpinnings of a collaborative space and enhances our identity as an epistemic community. Debra Kaufman devoted her academic career to building conceptual research and existential bridges between themes, problems, and disciplines. She conceived agency and consciousness as serious and committed tools to challenge the inclusion/exclusion dynamics that characterize both knowledge structures and the social world. She is Professor Emerita and Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University; Debra has been a central and prominent voice in Sociology, Feminist Studies, and Jewish Studies over fruitful decades and today's continuous and systematic work.
Her research represents a critical contribution to shaping and broadening the field of feminist Studies and Jewish Studies. Debra's relevance is due not only to her professional research and scholarship as a noted sociologist, but also through her sustained leadership as the founding Director of the Women's Studies (now Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Program), as one of the founding members of the Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies in Boston, and as one of the founding directors of the Jewish Studies program at Northeastern University.
She shared her knowledge and expanded her presence as a visiting professor in prestigious international universities and a guest lecturer worldwide. Special attention deserves her presence at Frei University in Germany, where she presented her research that would become articles and edited books on the place of the Holocaust in academia, and the post-Holocaust narratives, opening important doors to today's Holocaust studies.
Prof. Kaufman is a bridge builder. She has contributed to widening the meaning of scientific study through her vision of its foundation-conceptual, methodological, and political pluralism. A hard and productive worker, her wide-ranging publications are related to Jewish identity, memory, and the Holocaust, including two edited volumes: From the Protocols of Zion to the Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging the Media, the Law and the Academy (2007) and Women, Scholarship and the Holocaust (1996).
Our Contemporary Jewry journal was one of the first, if not the first, scholarly journals to devote an entire volume to a gender analysis of the Holocaust. As the submission of her candidacy highlights, Kaufman's article, "The Holocaust and Sociological Inquiry: A Feminist Analysis" (Kaufman 1996), brought much attention to the topic and the Journal, initiating a negative critique from Commentary entitled Auschwitz and the Professors-a disparaging attack on professors who research the Holocaust, most especially feminists. Inadvertently it brought attention to a topic that, as Kaufman had noted, received little sociological attention. It also unintentionally reached a much wider population than the intended original audience.
Debra has also been avant-garde in her substantive research contributions and presence in different academic frameworks. For the first time in ASA history, she submitted a thematic panel devoted entirely to the Jewish experience: Identities and Diaspora (s): The Global Jew in a Post-Modern Age. With Arnold Dashefsky, she organized Jewish Studies panels at many social sciences conferences-the Eastern Sociological Society, the Social Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Sociological Association. She explored and questioned the measures and meanings of Jewish Identity, contributing with a narrative and qualitative methodology for demographic studies and other studies, as well as the role of religion and the world of Orthodox women. Through her writings, lectures, and teaching, Debra Kaufman has played a significant role in establishing feminist studies as part of both sociological and Jewish scholarship.
Her work stands at the crossroads of social sciences and humanities. The growing cross-disciplinary interactions increase complexity and a deeper understanding of Jewish existence's global and transnational nature.
Let me share with you that empathy, sympathy, intensity, and willingness to meet defined our first encounter. Debra embraced me when I first arrived at the terra incognita of the ASSJ and immediately shared with me the question once posed by Dorothy Smith (some decades ago) in her plenary address to the American Sociological Association: how is it (sic, that) we (sic, social scientists) can study the world with us in it? (Kaufman 2022). She followed the dictum that self-reflection about the personal and professional narratives that drive our research could transform what are seemingly barriers to "scientific objectivity into scientific resources" (Harding 2004). One follows through her work a dialectics of interactions, the discovery of the existential dimension shaping and being shaped by the cognitive, and the reflections nourished by self-reflection.
Debra's contribution to our field through the rich and diverse perspectives of standpoint theory threw light on the knowledge of women, "arguing that "The World with Us in It"-Debra Kaufman's Research and Wisdom hierarchies naturally created ignorance about social reality and critical questions among those whom the hierarchies favored." This led to a sustained inquiry into the world of otherhood and alterity that runs through women, minorities, and Jews.
From her research's starting point from the lived experiences of those traditionally outside the institutions where knowledge about social life is generated and classified, Debra entered and elaborated relevant gazes on how new knowledge can be produced-challenging alleged neutral lines and points of tangency. We could say: peripheral stands mobilize the whole-the center and periphery. She brought Smith to dilemmas and questions that Arnold Eisen (1998) highlighted through his reading of DuBois: minorities' two-fold awareness facing the gap between the world as they experience it, while continually having to look at themselves through the eyes of the dominant other.
Congruent with strong objectivity, this relevant research field faces achievements and pitfalls of intersectionality and the new stages of feminism. Where do Jewish women stand in decolonial and postcolonial studies? Are they part of the Jewish collective that has been whitened? Part of the Constantine Jew? Deethnicized?
We share the importance of recognizing our standpoint and utilizing it as the entry point to our investigation. When with great surprise, I preceded her with the Sklare Award, I underlined that a conceptual trajectory is marked by time and context; following Erikson's dictum (1978), biography and historical circumstances meet. Bringing together these dimensions enhances the awareness that academic and existential goals and projects have nourished our intellectual and academic pathway through a challenging equilibrium between passion and rigor, truth and relevance. Translating our own history into research questions has been part of our intellectual journey, an itinerary determined both by our being selves embedded in worldviews derived from our social belongings and identities, while simultaneously committed to the stricter canon of scientific consciousness (Alford 1998;Bokser Liwerant 2018).
Simultaneously, the permanent dialogue with axioms, theories, and findings entails a sustained encounter with our contemporary intellectual production. Therefore, I recurrently ask myself if our association has provided the proper spaces for diversity to be expressed.
These last years have been extremely difficult for humanity and our social sciences. A constellation of crises has shaped our times, overlaid and overlapping, bringing together diverse dimensions and levels that define it as global and systemic. A pandemic-a sanitary threat brought about by the ongoing mutation of the menacing virus spreading across national and regional borders, economic crisis-given the already significant retraction and unemployment and the prognosis of a worldwide recession as well as the hardship of recovering, national and international political crisis-as expressed in the redefinition of the rules and codes of institutional orders and leaderships and regression of democracy in countries we never expected to be swept by authoritarian and extremist maladies, social crisis-having rendered the manifestation of the inequalities, impact, perception, and consequences and also in the sense that is challenging the collective identity that anchors a group's cultural security, and certainly, also, individual crises and new subjectivities-our neighbors emerge as a source of risk.
Crossing individual and society, our Jewish world, as a collective experience even amidst individualization processes, faces challenges regarding its belonging and associational vocation.
And we continue to work and search. Those of us who study and ponder the social world-its material and conceptual diversity and disciplinary convergences and divergences-must now explain, comprehend, interpret, and orient courses of action that vindicate the place of reason and imagination in a world whose variability, unpredictability, contradictions, and ambivalences require rigorous knowledge. Our most powerful tool against the unknown is knowledge: the exercise of understanding reality beyond our individual agency. The refusal to remain still-even if we stay within the safety of our own homes and working rooms-can only be achieved through thought, not just about the mechanisms of the crises but about the world where they occur; it is another way of showing how we gain knowledge of the world with us in it.
Funding There was no funding for this study.

Conflict of Interest
The author confirms that she has no conflict of interest.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.