Introduction

Welcome to the first issue of The YARID, a journal of Jewish thought and culture based at Harvard College. This collection has been a labor of love, and we’re proud of what these pieces reveal, taken collectively, about who we are and where we might be headed as a people.

For this inaugural issue, we asked contributors to share ideas, practices, traditions that feel absent or underappreciated in today’s Jewish life. Reckoning with the notion that the “golden age” of American Jewry—the postwar era of safety, prosperity, and influence—may be ending, authors imagined embracing of covenant, messianism, music, argument, sacrifice, diaspora, mysticism, food.

This journal is a healing project. In soliciting submissions, we invited all kinds of individuals to contribute their voices in constructive argument. The path to healing divides runs through bringing more people to the table. Gathering such a diverse group of thinkers inevitably produces dissonance and tension. Let the web of tension pull on your own convictions.

This journal is an optimistic project. Our experience as Jewish undergraduates is vibrant. We think constantly about the questions of Jewish life: how to build community, what ritual and personal practice should look like, and how to hold Jewish identity within a secular university. These questions rarely yield “lachrymose” answers. Jewish discourse is often focused on antisemitism, danger, and fracture—real issues—but we think there’s more to Jewish life than fear and isolation. Read The YARID as an example of what’s possible when we have the courage to imagine.

The YARID may feel cacophonous, full of competing perspectives and forms. It’s meant to. Creating this journal was itself cacophonous: we argued over our mission, over the word “pluralism,” over who to partner with, over the cover, and over timing. Those arguments made the product better, and brought us closer as collaborators and then as friends.

Some pieces here will resonate with your prior beliefs. There will also be pieces which feel surprising, hard to read, and unintuitive. We hope that these pieces will be close in proximity, and that in the whiplash you experience while reading, you are struck by something new.

We published these pieces not because we think they are “right” or “true” but because we found them interesting, moving, or valuable. These arguments are worth sitting with regardless of where you land. We believe that the juxtaposition of arguments and individuals we present in The YARID is generative and positive.

You, too, are part of the conversation. If this journal sparks something—an idea, an emotion, a response, anything—please share it with us at theyarid@theyarid.org.