By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.