The Independent Scholar

Welcome to Volume 11 of The Independent Scholar as we enter our second decade.

First, a word of thanks to those involved in doing the nitty gritty to get this journal out, issue after issue. Our hard-working team of Associate Editors cover a wide range of disciplines, and they are headed up by Amanda Haste (Humanities Editor) and  Joan Cunningham (STEM Editor).

Additionally, we have an Invisible Army of Peer Reviewers (PRs) to maintain the quality of our journal.  This issue has been delayed, not because of a lack of submissions, but because some authors, after receiving the suggestions of the PRs, chose to withdraw their papers. Others are still in the review process as it is becoming so difficult to source reviewers. But our Invisible Army of PRs have soldiered on, like the United States Post Office: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of  their appointed rounds . . . “ Yes, indeed!

If you are invited to review for TIS (or any other journal for that matter), please do reply, even (or especially) if it is simply to decline the invitation - our editors can’t move on to invite other reviewers if they’re still holding out hope of a response from you, and this can only prolong the review process, to the frustration of both editors and authors.

This volume features four critical essays, plus a reprint of the 2024 Eisenstein Essay Prize-winning essay, and an impressive book review section; these demonstrate the diversity of the membership of NCIS through the variety of topics discussed. The issue begins with the 2025 Elizabeth Eisenstein award-winning paper, Susan R. Breitzer’s “Sisterhood was Limited: Jews, Intersectionality, and the Second Wave Feminist Movement,” a piece that first appeared in The Independent Scholar. Following Breitzer is Kathryn Burrows with “The Simulacrum of Mental Illness, the DSM, and Madness.” in which the author looks at the forms and effects of the definitions employed in the Diagnostic Symptoms Manual (DSM) to demonstrate how these definitions have been used to reify and create that which they purport to describe.  Ilana Maymind, in “Edith Stein: Not a Self-Hating Jew,”  discusses the complicated history of a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism, became a nun, and ended in Auschwitz, where her birth determined her death. Anthony Casamasssima, in “Musician Roulette: A Reflexive Analysis of Capital, Class, and Creative Survival,” employs sociological theory in tracing the course of a musical career, as he interrogates various forms of capital (emotional, economic, social, etc.). We end where we began: with an Elizabeth Eisenstein Award prize-winner, this time for 2024 -   Mary Ann Irwin’s “‘Women with Hearts’ and the Americanization of Jewish San Francisco, 1850-1880.”

Indeed, one of the commonalities in much of this issue of the journal has to do with the sense of self, in its many permutations.

The book review section has even more variety, with no fewer than 15 reviews. We always give book authors the opportunity to respond to reviews, and we thank those who have chosen to do so as this makes for a livelier publication;  The Independent Scholar is committed to lively, respectful discussion.

Preparation for our next number—Volume 12—is already underway, but if you have a book to be reviewed or an article prepared, please do consider The Independent Scholar as your next stop. You can submit your offering through our TIS submissions portal at any time.