Crossing Over with Jewish Studies

By ANNA OLSWANGER

New York University Press began publishing books on Jewish studies in the mid-1980s.  One of its first entries into the field was the creation of the “Essential Papers on Jewish Studies” book series, edited by scholar Robert M. Seltzer, which brought together classic essays on such topics as the Talmud, Hasidism, and Kabbalah. Since then, the program has shifted its focus to emphasize issues salient to Jewish life in America.

Recently, NYU Press published Stephanie Wellen Levine's Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls, a “crossover” book that contains solid scholarship to appeal to academics, and an intriguing topic and accessible style to appeal to a general audience.

In this interview, NYU Press's Religion and Jewish Studies editor, Jennifer Hammer, discusses Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers against the background of the Jewish Studies publishing program she directs.  Hammer joined NYU Press twelve years ago as an intern out of college, and while working at the press, earned her masters in gender studies and feminist theory at The New School.  As the press's acquisitions editor for religion/Jewish studies and for psychology, she reviews proposed manuscripts, oversees the approval process, and helps to decide which books it publishes.

Q: How is NYU Press different from other university presses?  What is its mission?

JH: NYU Press sees its mission as publishing smart books that disseminate scholarship for teaching, research, and general intellectual illumination.  We work to stay on the cutting edge of scholarship and sometimes actively influence its direction by helping to make available core teaching materials in a developing field. We're a mid-sized press, which means that we can offer strong editorial and marketing while at the same time ensuring that our authors don't get lost within an enormous publishing house.  We're able to be "author-friendly," responding to our authors and issues relating to their books in a very timely way.

Q: What made you want to publish Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers?

JH: Within Jewish Studies, NYU Press focuses primarily on matters having to do with American Judaism. And our list as a whole contains several projects on various aspects of women's studies, particularly on adolescent girls and how they situate themselves in our society. Stephanie found that because the Hasidic girls she observed are not pressured to be popular with boys and are not silenced in the classroom in favor of boys (as they are educated separately), they are very self-assured. There is also not the infighting that girls in mainstream schools experience. This may in part be due to the absence of pressure to be popular with boys, and may also be the result of the Lubavich teaching that each act of goodness releases a "holy spark" that will help to bring the Messianic era closer, a concept that most of the girls Stephanie talked with took fairly seriously. So, Mystics was an excellent fit within our overall publishing program.

On top of that, Stephanie's findings were fascinating. The idea that girls in the very structured and gender-segregated Hasidic community would be more boisterous and more self-assured than many girls in our mainstream American culture was counterintuitive and thought-provoking. It seemed to us that anyone who has seen these young Hasidic women on a New York City street or doing outreach work across the nation might have ideas about meek girls raised in a sheltered patriarchal environment and would be intrigued to find their preconceptions blown away.

Q: What other "crossover" Jewish Studies titles has NYU Press done?

JH: A couple of years ago we published a book called Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement, which one of my colleagues acquired and edited. The book drew on engaging oral histories to recover the experiences of the Jewish women who played an important role in the civil rights movement. Like Mystics, it was meant for people interested in Jewish life and history, not only scholars. While not the same type of book, another project I worked on was The New Encyclopedia of Judaism, which we published last year. Like Stephanie's work and the book on Jewish women in the civil rights movement, it is meant to appeal to an interested Jewish audience, not just academics. And we're currently working on a follow-up, The Student's Encyclopedia of Judaism, which will make central information about Judaism and its key figures, practices, and beliefs accessible to a younger readership in grades 7-12.

Q: In general, what do you look for when considering a manuscript for the Jewish Studies list?

JH: For the Jewish Studies list, we look for projects that are about Jewish topics—key events or issues, major figures, historical developments—such as our American Jewish Women's History: A Reader, The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible's Writers, or our biography of Irving Howe.  While our recently published book Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts by Michael Bazyler is a book about law, it is also a Jewish Studies title in that it addresses a topic of central interest for the Jewish community in particular.  We look for potential projects that have something new to contribute to the field, that fit in with our overall publishing program (a book focusing on one aspect of Jewry in Poland may be important, for example, but not appropriate for NYU Press given our more domestic focus), that draw on solid scholarship, and that will have fairly broad appeal. 

Q: In general, what are the challenges of publishing a book for the Jewish market?

JH: Jews are famous as "People of the Book," and one of the challenges in publishing for a Jewish readership is that it's a well-served audience, with a high book-to-population ratio. So it can be a real challenge to find works that are new, that break new ground, and that will be of interest to a Jewish readership and others.

Q: How do you find new works?

JH: In addition to direct submissions and those from agents, we find manuscripts in a variety of ways  I travel two to three times a year to various college campuses across the country to meet with faculty and graduate students who work in Jewish and religious studies in order to find out what the focus of their current research is and to talk about their publishing plans.  I attend academic conferences and think about which presentations might be fleshed out into a book project, and then I approach the presenter to see if he or she has thought about this. Word of mouth from my current authors and other contacts in the field also alert me to promising work.  And on occasion, we try to come up with topics about which we think a book is needed, and then try to work backwards to find an author who may be interested in taking the book on.  

Q: Who is the audience for these books?

JH: Depending on the book, there are a few different potential readerships we aim for.  A book may be more academic in its focus, so that it will appeal primarily to other scholars or to students within university courses.  It may be more of a reference type of work, in which case it may be meant for libraries, synagogues, and other institutions, and only for a few very interested general readers. Or, like Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, it may be a crossover book with an intriguing topic and written in an accessible, non-specialist way that makes it attractive to the general public.  The print runs for each book we publish are set individually, based on the type of market for that kind of project, how many people we estimate will be interested in the topic, and what else is going on in the world at the time the book is expected to come out.  (For example, a book on presidential elections will likely sell more copies in the year leading up to a presidential election than the year or two afterwards.)  A more academically focused book will often have a smaller initial print run than a volume meant for a general interest readership, though texts meant for classroom adoption may also start out with fairly large print-runs. 

Q: What other Jewish Studies titles are in the works at NYU Press?

JH: We'll be continuing to focus on landmark reference projects in coming years, like our three-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, which won the National Jewish Book Award for reference in 2001-02, and The New Encyclopedia of Judaism, which won the New York Public Library Best of Reference Award, 2002. One forthcoming project I'm particularly excited about is a book called In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, by Joel Hoffman, which follows the fascinating story of the development of Hebrew from ancient times to its rebirth as a modern language. Hoffman shows us how the written record has survived, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and how scholars have attempted to figure out how the ancient language actually sounded. Hebrew set the stage for almost every modern alphabet, and Hoffman shows how, by looking at the history of this language, we can learn a good deal about how we express ourselves today. This is the sort of engaging, intriguing research NYU Press will continue to publish.