The Jewish Quarterly

The Jewish Quarterly is an international Jewish publication founded by Jacob Sonntag in 1953. It was based in the United Kingdom (UK) until 2021, when its ownership is transferred to Australian publisher Morry Schwartz^[a], who was born to Holocaust survivors.^[1][2] With four issues released a year, The Jewish Quarterly focuses on issues of Jewish concern, but also has interests in wider culture and politics.

The current editor is Jonathan Pearlman, who also edits Australian Foreign Affairs for Schwartz Media. Previous editors include Matthew Reisz, Elena Lappin and Rachel Shabi.

In 1974, Sonntag described The Jewish Quarterly:^[3]

If I were asked how I envisaged The Jewish Quarterly when I started it more than twenty years ago, I would say that it was to cultivate literary journalism in the best tradition of Central and Eastern Europe and, in particular, in the best tradition of Eastern European Jewish writing [...] I belong to the generation which looked for a synthesis between our Jewishness and our Europeanism, between our nationalism and our socialism, between the particular and the universal [...] Part of our upbringing was to revere the printed word, to adorn it with a power of its own. How could truth and reason not prevail'? It was just a question of finding the right word, the right combination of words, and everything else would follow from it. Literature was a living thing for us, and the world of books knew no boundaries. We cherished the illusion that 'you have only to will it and your dreams would cease to be fairy tales' [...] We felt as a collective, we had a sense of community, we felt called upon to add a link to the 'golden chain', handed to us by an earlier generation.

— Jacob Sonntag