AS THE INAUGURAL VOLUME of the Jewish Cultural Studies series, this book addresses a variety of ways in which Jewish culture is communicated and constructed. It sets out three major areas of concern in interpretations of Jewish culture: expression, identity, and representation. They have been placed in this order as the volume moves from close readings of texts to perspectives on social contexts and psychological processes. As the list of volumes in the series grows, I trust that readers will return to the essays here as benchmarks of these critical concerns.

The essays are, at a basic objective level, studies of Jewish culture. As cultural studies, they also deal subjectively with the way that Jewishness is perceived and created, by non-Jews as well as Jews. The essays show Jews to be a diverse lot, and give special attention to the expressions and representations of Jewishness that convey the plural identity of Jews among other Jews alongside questions of how the singular Jew is viewed, stereotyped, and appropriated by non-Jews. Individually, they contribute to the understanding of particular genres, whether film, folklore, music, literature, architecture, or art. Taken together, though, they represent a concern for cultural meaning as a theme of enquiry that cuts across genres and themes. Read alongside one another, the essays invite comparative enquiry into the patterns, and significance, of culture, and they force reflection on the intellectual legacy that makes culture central in human investigation. They use the label of Jewish cultural studies to discuss the importance of culture to the identity people call Jewish. We are aware that there is a movement of cultural studies devoted particularly to questions of media and power relations, and readers will recognize the influence of this movement on several writers. But our hope is that Jewish cultural studies can develop its own scholarly location rather than be construed as a sub-field.

This series is the first to be devoted exclusively to Jewish cultural studies, and will strive to articulate a distinctive understanding of Jewishness and the ‘cultural Jew’, and indeed culture generally. As my introduction explains, the interdisciplinary, hybridized field of Jewish cultural studies is of relatively recent formation, differentiated from both Jewish studies and cultural studies.