TWENTY YEARS AGO this cluster of articles, focusing on a German Jew who was, for a while at least, an unapologetic Nazi sympathizer, might have been impossible—at least in a venue such as this. But with the passage of time it has become possible, as Laura S. Lieber suggests in her diplomatic response, to view Schoeps as an important, if marginalized figure, never quite fully accepted within nor now excluded from Jewish tradition. Lieber genially proposes the figure of Aher—who is both the quintessential apostate as well as the object of enduring fascination for Jews and non-Jews alike—as analogous to Schoeps. With this, she advocates a capacious view both of Jewishness as well as of German Jewish Studies more generally. There could be no pithier editorial policy statement for Nexus than this.

When as a young man Schoeps founded the Nazi Jewish Vanguard (Der deutsche Vortrupp. Gefolgschaft deutscher Juden) he cannot have known how this would look in hindsight. For while Nazi racist ideology was already evident, the pogroms and Shoah were not yet in sight. He was not alone among conservatives who thought the Nazi movement could be made useful to their cause. And he of course did not know that members of his own family would be murdered in the Holocaust. But this is not to suggest that he was in any way or at any time an accidental gadfly. Schoeps, it would seem, made a career out of being “contrarian”—as his admiring student, Hans Hillerbrand, writes in the following pages. And in this, though surely not on this account alone, he succeeded brilliantly.

With this second volume of Nexus we are pleased to introduce the new Forum section, which is meant to capture diverse points of view on debated and controversial topics within German Jewish Studies. It is also meant to capitalize upon academic events that by their very nature are available to the relatively few, but have so much to offer to a wider readership. In this case, it was a special symposium held at Duke University on September 5, 2011 in honor of Hans H. Hillerbrand, who had, as he elaborates below, studied under the tutelage of Hans-Joachim Schoeps. The Duke Jewish Studies program, in conjunction with Duke German Studies and Religious Studies, invited Julius Schoeps—Hillerbrand's long-time friend and colleague, and son of Hans-Joachim Schoeps—to speak on the occasion of Hillerbrand's impending retirement from Duke.