NEXUS, THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, aims to showcase innovative scholarship in German Jewish Studies in North America and to foster the growth of new directions in the field. With this second volume we are especially excited to inaugurate the “Nexus Forum” section, designed to introduce unusual and controversial topics and to stimulate discussion in the research community. To this end, each volume will treat a single topic in depth, using a “statement and response” format. Our first Nexus Forum examines the complex case of Hans-Joachim Schoeps, German Jew and Nazi sympathizer, from multiple perspectives, and invites debate about the legacy of this controversial figure. In “A Most Unwanted Man,” William Donahue introduces Schoeps and comments further on our conception of the Nexus Forum for future volumes.

The second section of Nexus 2 presents seven original essays that likewise pose important challenges to established scholarship and explore intriguing new research topics in German Jewish Studies. In “Setting the Record Straight,” Richard Levy offers an incisive discussion of the distortions that the debunkers, rather than the promoters, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have introduced into common knowledge about this noxious document. We've known for years that this infamous text is a forgery; but, as Levy eloquently shows here, we have for too long contented ourselves with shoddy scholarship regarding its provenance and deployment. We have allowed the ethical concern to expose the book to overshadow a rigorous scholarly examination. Now is the time to “set the record straight.”

With his compelling analysis of the transformation of Jewish congregations in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina from 1860 to 1880, Anton Hieke calls into question the prevailing view that American Reform Judaism in these southern states developed largely as a transplant of German Reform Judaism. Indeed, this investigation of inflections of the movement in the southern United States implicitly asks us to reconsider the extent to which we think of Reform Judaism as primarily “German.” In “Weimar on Broadway,” Karina von Tippelskirch presents an engaging close reading of another type of German transplant to the United States, Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson's failed refugee play Another Sun, and considers the implications of her conclusions for the study of exile literature in general.