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Even given the diversity and number of exceptional scholars writing for this three-volume compendium—we will detail their contributions below—there are areas of Judaism that are less thoroughly covered than we might have wished, had we neither time nor word limits. An example would be a section on modern Jews of Color, who are gaining significance in both the U. S. and Israel. We recognize the rise in awareness and importance of non-white Jewish communities and look forward to there being a significant body of scholarship on their social and historical experiences as »a minority of a minority« in the years ahead, enough that it will become recognized as an academic specialization.

Half a century after the advent of feminist scholarship in Jewish studies, we still struggle to chart women’s normative experiences in every era. While our chapters, particularly those devoted to history, are no longer the stories of great men, there remains an insufficiency of both primary evidence and current history writing to address this lack. The abundance of feminist scholarship is addressed in a chapter by Prof. Gwynn Kessler that focusses on the literature on Jewish women, feminism, and gender studies in the past half-century. But the absence of women throughout these volumes remains a problem in addressing the entirety of Judaism while still ignoring half the Jewish population, even if less so than before. We do not wish to commit the error of what is archly called, »add women and stir,« as though by simply dedicating one chapter out of thirty, the issue is then addressed. But we recognize that even with the wonderful scholarly works that Kessler records, there is yet much work to be done to have adequately redressed this problem.

The worldview of the editors has also skewed these volumes towards what is today labeled »Ashkenormativity.« That is to say that while there certainly is in these volumes some consideration of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry—viz. the recognition of Jews from Arab or Muslim majority countries—the work as a whole tends to be Eurocentric. This perhaps is to be expected in a work published in Germany post-Holocaust. But given the concomitant exodus of modern Jewry from Muslim majority countries following World War II and given their political power (albeit exercised as a minority in coalition governments) in modern Israel, our lack of scholar-authors from and explicit chapters on those communities only exacerbates the lacuna. We hope this »nostra culpa« is accepted as a step in recognizing our omission, on the way to repairing it in any subsequent editions.

Other areas where scholarship is beginning to have sufficient depth to merit inclusion in any subsequent iteration of this work, while not yet being sufficiently mainstream for entire chapters now, might be: studies of the various Jewish disability communities, the recognition of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) Jews, the phenomenon of intermarriage (which, while much studied statistically, has no consensus of opinion across either Jewish scholarship or in Jewish communities at large).

As a final issue in our study of Judaism, we have neglected the persistence of poverty in the global Jewish community. This latter issue is dispiriting, for one might have hoped that as the Jewish community recovered from the depredations of the Second World War and that as there was substantial regrowth of the Jewish communities in America and Israel, poverty might have receded. But as the Bible itself prophesies, »the poor will never cease from the land« (Deuteronomy 15:11). Sadly, the disparity between rich and poor in the modern State of Israel is disturbingly high. But the poor are further disenfranchised by the fact that it is the wealthy and the well-educated who write the histories and the sociological studies. Thus, the poor remain largely invisible within the broader world of Jews and Judaism.