Preface

The 2023 volume of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book ranges far and wide across German-Jewish studies, continuing a long tradition of publishing high-quality original material from scholars across the world. The variety of contributions to the Year Book is a bellwether of the health and diversity of the field of German-Jewish studies internationally. It comfortably embraces: a study of the brothers Gershom and Werner Scholem; a discussion of Queer, Black, and Jewish characters in contemporary German television; Ludwig Philippson’s mid-nineteenth-century grappling with philosophy of religion; an examination of Hollywood, European film, and exile; and Alois von Sonnenfels’ mid-eighteenth-century German/Hebrew treatise on alchemy.

We are pleased to be able to announce the winners of both the 2023 and 2024 Year Book Essay Prize. The 2023 Essay Prize has been awarded to Sam S. B. Shonkoff for his article ‘Gender in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales’. The winner of the 2024 Essay Prize is Matthew Johnson’s ‘Off-Translation: Bertha Pappenheim’s Yiddish-German’.

As always, we offer our heartfelt thanks to the Year Book team—our managing editor Almut Becker and our copy-editors Kat Hall and Anna Kealy—without whom there would be no publication. Thanks, too, are due to our colleagues at Oxford University Press for their professionalism and support. We note also with profound appreciation the many hours of voluntary service provided by the legion of Year Book reviewers, whose role in publishing too often goes unheralded.

It is important, too, to register the gratitude of both the Year Book and the Leo Baeck Institute for the continued generous support of the German government's Bundesministerium des Innern and the Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.