Penn Press and the Katz Center are delighted to announce a new chapter in the history of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Beginning with the winter 2026 issue (JQR 116.1), all 136 years of the journal, including current and future issues, will be free to readers online without charge or impediment. The journal will not charge author fees.
The Jewish Quarterly Review is the oldest English language journal of Jewish studies scholarship. The journal was established in 1889 in London by Israel Abrahams and Claude Montefiore. In 1910, the journal was brought to Philadelphia, to Dropsie College, the predecessor to the Katz Center, where it was coedited by Cyrus Adler and Solomon Schecter. The move to Philadelphia was a significant moment in the emergence of the United States as a major center of Jewish intellectual life, transporting Wissenshaft des Judentums—the movement to apply the tools of modern scholarship to Jewish history and culture—to America.
The 126 existing volumes of JQR record the history of academic Jewish studies over the last 135 years, At the same time, they also capture the present and future of the field. Since 2004, under the leadership of editors David Myers, Natalie Dohrmann, and the late Elliott Horowitz who passed away in 2017, the journal was reinfused with intellectual vitality, not just sustaining the tradition of scholarly excellence inherited from earlier editors but working to ensure the coherence and eloquence of each issue and opening the journal up to new voices and kinds of scholarship. The move to an open-access format is an extension of their creative vision, an effort to connect scholarship to a broader range of readers.
As those familiar with the economics of open access will recognize, moving to Open Access without passing the expense onto contributing authors represents a considerable investment of resources, and Steve Weitzman, the director of the Katz Center, along with the journal’s editorial team, are grateful to be in a position to provide such support. We see this investment as part of the Katz Center’s commitment to sharing the insights of scholarship as broadly as we can. Our aim is to increase the readership for the excellent articles and essays published in the journal, and to benefit researchers and students who may not have access to journals only available through subscription or university libraries.
As the world has been learning the last few years, AI is reshaping how humans think and learn, and that makes it all the more troubling that its outputs can sometimes be poisoned by the misinformation and antisemitism now rampant online. We hope an open-access JQR free to everyone online can, however modestly, elevate and enrich what one can learn about Jews from the internet by sharing the highest quality peer-reviewed research with anyone open to the insights of academic scholarship.
About the University of Pennsylvania Press
True to its Philadelphia roots, Penn Press is well-known for its distinguished list of publications in American history and culture, including innovative work on the transnational currents that surrounded and shaped the republic from the colonial period through the present, as well as prize-winning publications in urban studies. The Press is equally renowned for its publications in European history, literature, and culture from late antiquity through the early modern period. Penn Press’s social science publications tackle contemporary political issues of concern to a broad readership of citizens and scholars, notably including a long-standing commitment to publishing path-breaking work in international human rights. The JQR is the Press’ sixth Diamond Open Access journal and demonstrates the Press’ commitment to ensuring wide global reach for its scholarship.
About the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is driven by the mission to deepen and broaden the understanding of Jewish history, texts, cultures, ideas, and experiences. The research it supports spans all periods of Jewish history, from distant antiquity through to the present day; it reaches into every part of the globe where Jews have lived, and it is grounded in a wide range of disciplines and approaches. Over the decades, after supporting hundreds of scholars and untold numbers of discoveries and publications, it has earned a reputation as the nation’s preeminent research center in the study of Jewish history and culture.
