You are a managing editor for an intellectual magazine that is looking for a piece of writing to reprint in the magazine for contemporary audiences to enjoy. Choose a piece of Jewish writing that will be relevant for your readership. This means you should research and read a new piece of Jewish writing using the skills we practiced. Write a letter to your editor-in-chief explaining which piece you believe should be reprinted in the magazine. First, imagine what kind of magazine you would edit. Is it for a primarily Jewish audience, such as The Jewish Review of Books or The Forward? Is it a general literary magazine, such as The New Yorker, The LA Review of Books, or The Paris Review? Would you place your letter as a book review in a newspaper such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or USA Today? Would you make up your own magazine? Would you rather create an anthology of writing that could be published as a book, possibly to be used for pleasure reading or for university classes? What other kinds of writing would be in your magazine, paper, or anthology? How would the audience and usual readership shape how you would try to convince your readers of the importance of reading your selection? Do you have a particular goal or politics, such as feminism or queer representation? What kind of religious or ethnic background do you imagine your readers having? Second, explain why you think your readers will appreciate the piece. How is the piece relevant today? How might it have been differently relevant in its own moment? What are its limitations for todays audiences? What role does genre play in appealing to different audiences? What, if any, canons could this piece of writing be a part of? Think of canon not only as scripture or the Hebrew Bible, but also in terms of literatures, heritages, history or other communities or topics. How can the piece you chose change how we understand canon(s) or communities? Think of this as an introduction you would include in your magazine to contextualize the piece. Intersperse some quotes or short excerpt so that your editor-in-chief can get a sense of the piece you chose and how it fits in with your pitch and analysis. Finding Primary Sources Find two pieces of writing that you might discuss in your final project. They should be from the same genre, such as recipes, Midrash, graphic autobiographical work, etc. Finding Secondary Sources Additionally, find one scholarly and one non-scholarly piece of writing that discusses your example. How would you use the scholarly and non-scholarly discussions? Why have you chosen this particular to analyze? What are you interested in about it? What do you think the discussions you found fail to discuss? How did they make you think further about your writing example or Jewish writing in general? Most importantly, how can you use each to begin crafting your final paper?
