Out of the editorial:
This year’s periodical follows on from the last issue “Geographical Turn”, which focused on Jewish Studies on the other side of Germany’s Eastern border. In 2010 we turned our attention to the resurgent interest in the Jewish religion and culture in Middle and Eastern Europe and its foundation in this academic field. In PaRDeS authors from Romania, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic referred to their current research on Jewish topics. The articles  reflected this rich topic and the vast extent of questions (with regard to geography and time) about this field of academic research into Judaism (“Wissenschaft vom Judentum”) in Middle and Eastern Europe. With the geographical defined focus in this year’s issue, we aim to draw, in more detail, the current map of academic research into Judaism (“Wissenschaft vom Judentum”) with its two centres – Israel and the USA.
This year we are presenting a periodical, which has emerged through the co-operation from  the counterpart organisations “Association of Jewish Studies (“Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e. V.”) and the “British Association of Jewish Studies” (BAJS). The emphasis is placed on the field of academic research into Judaism (“Wissenschaft vom Judentum”) in the British Isles. We focus on a geographical area, in which the second largest Jewish population in Europe lives, after France.