Then and Now
With Alex Berry, I have launched a new web project that analyzes journals in Jewish studies. You can view the site here, where you can see many different ways of visualizing and interacting with the data. What does it all mean? You tell us!
The Project Manager was Laura Foster, to whom I am enormously grateful. None of this could have happened without her. Thanks are also due to the SBL Press and AJS and to Newgen, the firm we hired to do the actual digitizing. Most of all, though, our continuing thanks to our authors. They make BJS what we are.
Press Release
April 21, 2020
Brown Judaic Studies (BJS) announces the launch of our Open Access Books program. During the 2019-2020 academic year, with the support of a grant from the NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Books program, we have been digitizing about fifty titles from our backlist in order to make them publicly accessible at no cost in perpetuity. The books are available for download in different formats, including PDF, EPUB, HTML, and plain text (for text-mining). Most of the books have received additional copyediting and several contain new prefaces by the authors. Print on Demand editions of these new editions will also be available for purchase.
BJS Open Books will be available on the Brown Judaic Studies website in all formats. The books can also be accessed, in different formats, through a number of other sites: JSTOR (HTML and PDF); Project MUSE (HTML and PDF); the Hathi Trust (PDF); SBL Press (Print on Demand); Amazon (e-Reader); and the Brown Digital Repository (PDF, HTML, e-Reader and TXT). The Association for Jewish Studies will also post a link to our titles.
Current available titles, with links to JSTOR, are below. We hope to have all of our open access titles available on all platforms during this summer.
Brown Judaic Studies is a book series specializing in high-quality scholarly books in Jewish studies. Run by the faculty of the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University, we have published over 350 volumes over forty years. For more information about Brown Judaic Studies and our recent publications, click here.
Currently available volumes:
History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band by William Cutter, and David C. Jacobson https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv540
Kol Nidre: Studies in the Development of Rabbinic Votive Institutions by Moshe Benovitz https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5pq
Claude Montefiore and Christianity by Maurice Gerald Bowler https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5gt
The Jewish Family in Antiquity by Shaye J.D. Cohen https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb9cp
Diasporas in Antiquity by Shaye J.D. Cohen, and Ernest S. Frerichs https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5cc
The Peri Pascha Attributed to Melito of Sardis: Setting, Purpose, Sources by Lynn H. Cohick https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb90c
Behind the Essenes: History and Ideology in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Philip R. Davies https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5fb
The Law of Jealousy: Anthropology of Sotah by Adriana Destro https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5q6
Barukh Kurzweil and Modern Hebrew Literature by James S. Diamond https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5bw
The Libes Briv of Isaac Wetzlar by Morris M. Faierstein https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv4xn
Essays on Biblical Method and Translation by Edward Greenstein https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5k8
Mishnah’s Theology of Tithing: A Study of Tractate Maaserot by Martin Jaffee https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv4sq
A Conceptual Commentary on Midrash Leviticus Rabbah: Value Concepts in Rabbinic Thought by Max Kadushin https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5wm
Goodenough on the Beginnings of Christianity by A.T. Kraabel https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv57f
The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented by David Novak https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb9fn
A Wise and Discerning Mind: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long by Saul Olyan, and Robert Culley https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb93t
A History of the United Jewish Appeal by Marc Lee Raphael https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5n7
Approaches to Modern Judaism by Marc Lee Raphael https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb99q
A History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods by Jeffrey Rubenstein https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv502
Scholastic Rabbinism: A Literary Study of the Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan by Anthony J. Saldarini
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb987
Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality by Michael Satlow https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5s5
Sectarian Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony and the Penal Code by Lawrence H. Schiffman https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5js
Jewish Thought Adrift: Max Wiener by Robert S. Schine https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv4p8
Philo’s Perception of Women by Dorothy Sly https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv4w5
From Rebuke to Consolation: Exegesis and Theology in the Liturgical Anthology of the Ninth Av Season by Elsie Stern https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv4z4
BJS was established about forty years ago as an outlet for (mostly) high-quality, usually specialized, scholarly monographs. Recently we began also to publish collections of scholarly papers, usually emerging from a conference or gathered as part of a Festschrift (a volume honoring an academic colleague). Although we publish only a few volumes each year, over the years we have accumulated a significant backlist and many of our older volumes remain foundational in several different areas within Judaic studies. We have also begun to develop projects that begin as invited lectured by distinguished scholars at Brown University (for our first publication as part of this initiative, see this book by Hasia Diner).
As a publishing outlet, BJS is unusual. It is administered by the faculty of the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University, who serve (without compensation) as acquisitions editors who can also help with the specialized contents of the volumes. Once a volume is accepted, we outsource the copyediting and typesetting and then send then completed project to our partner, SBL Press, for printing, marketing, and distribution. Since we maintain a lean budget, we are able to price our volumes relatively affordably, despite their specialized appeal.
We frequently receive requests, many from underfunded research libraries abroad, for free copies of our books, any of which had small print runs and are now out of print. The primary goal of the Humanities Open Book Program is to begin to make these titles widely available. Authors will have the option of making minor corrections or revisions to their volumes, and some will be invited to add retrospective essays. It is our hope that opening access to these important and refreshed volumes will lower the barriers to access and allow their ideas to circulate widely.
At the same time, we also have other larger goals for this initiative:
Stay tuned!
In a piece recently published in Inside Higher Ed, Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost discuss their experiences trying to get academics to write for broader audiences and pinpoint ten particular challenges that academics have in reaching wider audiences. They are certainly right that academics have challenges reaching a wider audience. As one who has struggled, with mixed results, to make my own scholarship more accessible, I have long believed that this is a far more significant problem than academics usually admit.
The preference that many, probably most, scholars (particularly in the humanities) have for writing for their peers rather than broader audiences has had, to my mind, two rather severe consequences. The first is that it leaves a vacuum for others with far less expert knowledge to fill. There is, for example, a wide audience for writing about religion, even from a non-confessional vantage point. When I refuse to write accessibly about religion because I am afraid of dealing with matters with which I do not have deep expert knowledge (which is necessary in almost all accessible writing) I leave the door open for others, with even less expert knowledge. Someone will write these books and when scholars do not they have only themselves to blame for the (often flawed, from a scholarly perspective) knowledge that does become popularized. From this the second consequence flows: the decline of the humanities. It is difficult to blame people for thinking that the work of academics in the humanities is irrelevant when smart people cannot fathom the books of these very scholars. And this leads down the road to, for example, arguments for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Given the many advantages of having one’s ideas accessible to a broad public, why do so many academics – smart, well-educated, people with deep expert knowledge – have a hard time writing for a broad audience? Why do academics struggle with the ten challenges identified by Schaberg and Bogost?
There must be a variety of causes but I suspect that one of the most important ones is the dissertation. Virtually all scholars in the humanities complete a dissertation as their first sustained research project. This project often takes years to complete and involves mastery not just of a narrow slice of knowledge but, more relevantly, of a particular way of writing. For this piece of writing we are rewarded, first with a degree and then, if we are lucky, with praise and a job. Most of us who presently hold secure academic positions attribute, at least to some degree, our success to our dissertations. The result? For continue to write things that resemble the form we labored so hard to master and that got us in the door; there is a powerful cycle of positive reinforcement. More than twenty years after writing my own dissertation that form of writing still comes naturally to me. Breaking free of it is a continuous challenge.
But here’s the rub: almost nobody likes reading a dissertation. Even academics don’t like reading them, even if they acknowledge the importance of the substance of their arguments. As Eric Hayot writes in The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities,
[Dissertations are] narrow, boring, self-indulgent, and overwritten; they’re competent rather than scintillating. If we told students up front that this was that they were setting out to do for the next couple years [sic], who in their right mind would ever want to write one?
No one. For this reason I recommend writing your dissertation as a book and leaving the genre of the Dissertation behind entirely. Don’t write your dissertation for audience of five; don’t do a literature review (a special genre of chapter that only exists in the humanities dissertation…); don’t produce merely technical competence. Do create an original theory and/or a genuine argument. Writing this way will save you an immense amount of time, and spare you years of mastering an intellectual form (the Dissertation) that is unpublishable and naive (and which, to book, you will only ever write one of in your entire academic career). This doesn’t mean, of course, that your dissertation-written-as-a-book will be a good book. But it seems much better to me to write a mediocre book than a great Dissertation since your goal in the long run is to write a good book, and it’s easier to get there from something that resembles it than something that doesn’t. (p. 42)
For Hayot, and increasingly for me, the dissertation is not simply a one-off exercise but it is actually pernicious. It conditions its writers to write in a particular, inaccessible style that puts us on the road to the elimination of the NEH (okay, a little hyperbole on my part for rhetorical effect).
To begin the long course to rectifying this, we – and I speak here to my fellow senior academics who hold tenured positions, train graduate students, and make judgments about the hiring and promotion of our junior colleagues – must take the lead. We should train our students to write books rather than dissertations and then make sure that those who write books, particularly accessible books, are rewarded accordingly. Our future is in our hands and we will reap what we sow.