In our autumn edition in 2014 we published articles from a conference on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’.¹ They were guest edited for the issue by Axel Stähler and Sue Vice, the organisers of the conference. In their joint introduction they wrote:

Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited with an ‘attitude’ and their fiction is perceived to celebrate ‘the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice’.

It will come as no surprise, particularly given what they quoted about ‘attitude’ and ‘anarchic potential’, that the first Jewish author they mentioned, because of his recent award at the time of the Man Booker Prize, was Howard Jacobson. One of the contributors to that issue was David Brauner writing on ‘Fetishizing the Holocaust: Comedy and Transatlantic Connections in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights’.² When Bryan Cheyette and David Brauner approached the editor of this journal with the proposal to mark and celebrate Howard Jacobson's eightieth birthday, the editorial board readily accepted the offer. The contents are introduced by Bryan Cheyette, and David Brauner contributes a new interview with Jacobson. The issue also contains a book review by Howard Cooper of David's recent monograph on Jacobson in the Manchester University Press series Contemporary British Novelists.³

In our autumn 2018 issue we welcomed Lily Kahn as our guest editor for an issue on ‘Shakespeare and the Jews’;⁴ the spring 2019 issue included a symposium on the novelist, playwright and critic Gabriel Josipovici.⁵ These are reminders that the theme of ‘Jews and literature’ has been a fruitful topic for the journal under successive editors from its inception.

The second part of this issue is dedicated to another regular topic, ‘Judaism and Psychotherapy’. The first part of the current exploration was featured in the spring issue and was largely focused on psychoanalysis: practitioners and its relationship to Jewish concerns and values. The three articles in this issue address the impact of the coronavirus on society in general, and early impressions of its effect on the practice of counselling and psychotherapy online. Harriett Goldenberg explores how the pandemic has highlighted basic issues in our lives and how fundamental Jewish principles and existential values meet each other. Jane Haynes explores how the clinical phenomena unique to the online encounter differ from previous therapeutic interactions, for example in the greater autonomy of the patient to control their environment. Nikki Scheiner explores the psycho-social impact of lockdown on the general population, including on the rates of mental illness in frontline workers, but also the impact of the loss of significant ritual and life-cycle events on the Jewish community. The issue concludes with In Memoria for Rabbis Daniel Farhi z'l and Henry Brandt z'l.