FROM THE FOUNDATION

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the final issue of CONTACT, the magazine of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life.

When we launched CONTACT in 1998, we wrote that “there must be free discussion and unrestrained debate about vital Jewish issues and the Jewish future. We hope to use CONTACT to stimulate this conversation.”

We believe we have ably fulfilled this mandate over the last two decades. We’ve explored issues of Jewish unity, American Jewish demographics, the changing nature of families, the financial crisis and the Jewish community, and the relationship between American Jews and Israel. We tackled the looming crisis of personnel in the Jewish community, efforts at reinventing the synagogue, the challenges facing those who have left Hasidic communities, the importance and potential of Jewish service, the need for Jewish early childhood education, the importance of Jewish summer camp, and so much more. From Hebrew in America to Jewish life in the public sphere; from exploring opportunities to build Jewish infrastructure in emerging neighborhoods to reporting from global Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and India, CONTACT has helped shed light on the contemporary Jewish experience.

We’ve been privileged to include a truly diverse array of writers, thinkers, activists, artists, and commentators who have contributed to CONTACT since its inception. Eli Valley has steered this ship expertly over the past 19 years, and we at The Steinhardt Foundation thank him for his professionalism and camaraderie.

In recent years, as opinions have exploded on blogs and social media, it has become clear to us that a print magazine is not the best way to reach our community. Thus, after 20 years of publishing CONTACT, we have decided to cease publication. In doing so, we are joining hundreds of magazines, journals and newspapers that have closed in the past decade. While some print publications find new life in digital form online, we have decided to close the magazine. However, this and all of our previous issues will still be accessible on our website, http://www.steinhardtfoundation.org/publications/.

For the community of contributors and readers who have valued CONTACT and enjoyed its pages, we know this decision is a disappointment. We hope to continue being in touch with our readership in new and developing ways to shape and stimulate Jewish communal debate.

We want to thank our readers for your time and feedback. It has been a pleasure to engage with you over these two decades.

Sincerely,
Rabbi David Gedzelman,
President and CEO, The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life

EDITOR'S PIECE

The Summer issue of CONTACT, and the final issue of its twenty-year run, explores a panoply of issues, themes, and personalities central to the contemporary Jewish experience. We begin with Shira Dicker’s reported feature on the growing phenomenon of single women rabbis. Often facing a multitude of preconceptions and expectations regarding both their gender and the rabbinate itself, these pioneers are charting new paths of Jewish communal belonging — and in the process reimagining the role of spiritual leader in the community.

CONTACT then explores new expressions of Jewish ritual with a piece by Paul Golin, Executive Director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism. Turning the Bar and Bat Mitzvah experience into a celebration of not only Jewish history and tradition but of a multiplicity of cultures and experiences that define contemporary Jewish life, “Cultural B Mitzvahs” aim to make the coming-of-age ceremony more poignant, personal, and relevant for all involved. Ari Goldman then examines the challenges and imperatives of secular education in the Hasidic world through a profile of YAFFED, which aims to spread secular education via internal Hasidic persuasion and via the arms of city and state regulations. We visit three Jews deepening their Jewish connections through music, history and the rabbinate, and we excerpt from Ilana Kurshan’s If All the Seas Were Ink, a deeply affecting memoir that uses the Talmud to explore love, loss, heartbreak, and hope. Finally, we share some of the beautiful and gripping art of David Wander, who uses imagery to penetratingly analyze and reflect on Jewish narrative and text.

As we end our run, CONTACT would like to thank our dozens of contributors over the course of the magazine’s history who have helped illuminate the most compelling, thought-provoking, and little-known reaches of the modern Jewish experience. Thank you to Ari Goldman for his invaluable input and experience. Thank you to Erica Coleman for her expertise in copy editing. Thank you to Yakov Wisniewski, our Design Director, whose elegant and streamlined designs brought an unmistakable visual allure to the magazine. Finally, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to you, our readers, with whom we’ve learned, discovered, and shared so much in the way of Jewish life, history, culture, and memory during the past twenty years. May you continue to reflect on the thoughts, ideas, and perspectives CONTACT has helped stir for years to come.