Continuum: Anti-Semitism Middle East Feminism by Justice Lawler

The first issue of the original Continuum announced an editorial platform of such length and detail as to evoke a blueprint for practically everything from opposition to nuclear deterrence to advocacy of Testhardium and Maréchallian Thomism.

In its first issues some attention was paid to that editorial position, but as time elapsed it became obvious that no written prescription would be adequate to the range of the journal.

In fact its last published issue focused on the second generation of the Frankfurt Critical Theorists, a topic certainly never envisioned in the first few years of publication. Elsewhere, and in a different context, I quote Kierkegaard's "O Luther, thou hadst ninety-five theses, how terrible! But in a deeper sense, the more theses the less terrible."

So, the new Continuum has no specific editorial platform, or at least no platform made up of scores of planks.

It does, however, have a specific rationale, or better yet a specific drift, tenor, ethos; a specific mood or style or spirit, or even, aura. If this were formulable it might reduce to simply: openness to what is; to Max Jacob's criterion, permeable; to Foucault's relation between the activity of truth telling and the exercise of power. For the new Continuum all of these can be precisioned in practical terms.

This will be a journal of history, hermeneutics, and social concern, open to the personal dimensions of the transcendent.

Even more practically, this will be a multidisciplinary journal in which specialists in disparate fields will write in such a way of their issues, problems, and methods that students of quite different disciplines will make new connections, will discern new relations among the issues and methods in their own particular fields.

From the perspective just defined, this first number of the new Continuum is not entirely representative.

Its focus is more narrow than will be that of future issues. But that focus has been very consciously determined, arising as it does out of a sense of absolute moral urgency. To write of the Holocaust and its attendant mysteries and problems always entails a risk, a risk of distancing, of objectifying, of numbing by repetition.

Nevertheless, it remains a risk that has to be taken.