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Addressing questions raised by the 2009 MLA roundtable “Does the English Department Have a Jewish Problem?,” this special issue of MELUS will survey the current state of Jewish American literary scholarship and explore new directions for the future of the field. Guest edited by Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert, the issue aims to highlight innovative approaches that will reinvigorate and redefine the study of Jews and Jewishness in American literature and to examine challenges posed by Jewish literature to the disciplinary and theoretical paradigms of American and ethnic literature. We invite a broad range of contributions, but topics of particular interest include:

· New opportunities for the study of Jewish literature created by recent critical approaches such as whiteness, transnational, comparative ethnic, and multilingual studies, and book history
· Moving beyond equations of Jewishness with whiteness (e.g., essays on American Jews of color, Sephardic Jews, and non-Jewish ethnic writers whose work addresses Jewishness)
· Gender, sexuality, and queer identity (e.g., essays on underrepresented women, gay, and lesbian writers)
· Aesthetic contributions of Jewish writers to the development of American literature
· Texts written, in whole or in part, in languages other than English, such as Yiddish and Hebrew
· Studies in genres other than prose fiction, including poetry, autobiography, drama, criticism, children’s and young adult literature, graphic narratives
· Pedagogical approaches to integrating Jewish literature into multi-ethnic literature curriculum

Completed papers in MLA format should be between 7000-9000 words, including notes and works cited. Queries concerning possible submissions as well as book reviews are welcome. Please send essays as e-mail attachments to Lori Harrison-Kahan (harrislo@bc.edu). The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript, but should be included on a separate title or cover sheet, which should also contain complete mailing and e-mail addresses. Deadline for submission: June 30, 2010.