Sanctuary welcomes submissions of opinion-based and personal essays, criticism, reviews of recent literary and artistic work, academic essays written for a general audience, and original research-based features on topics of interest to the American Jewish community. Submissions should align with Sanctuary’s mission of producing work that contributes to independent, generative dialogue grounded in Jewish intellectual and spiritual traditions. Particular topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Jewish communal life and dynamics; contemporary religious belief and practice; contemporary discourse about religion; Jewish ethics; the status and treatment of marginalized groups; collective justice (including racial, economic, disability, LGBTQIA+, and environmental justice); gender and sexuality; antisemitism and its role in American Jewish discourse; and Israel/Palestine. Submissions on topics of interest to specific religious, cultural, or geographic subgroups of American Jews are welcome, provided that contributors endeavor to make their work relevant and accessible to broader audiences. We are not accepting unsolicited fiction or poetry at this time. Reviews of current popular culture and media are accepted so long as the review engages with the subject with intellectual depth and rigor. See below for guidelines regarding divrei Torah and work relating to prescriptive and normative questions of Jewish belief and practice.

We will prioritize work that:

  • Seeks to engage with audiences in a manner that advances, deepens, and ideally, invites new participants to, the conversation about the subject matter.
  • Seeks to expose audiences to new ideas and perspectives, rather than change minds.
  • Seeks to engage as wide an audience as possible, without compromising on the authenticity or precision of its purpose.
  • Seeks to promote broader and deeper literacy in Jewish textual and oral traditions.
  • Seeks to encounter texts and traditions through lenses that are novel, imaginative, or unfamiliar to non-specialist readers.

We especially welcome submissions from contributors of marginalized or minoritized background or experience. Contributors need not identify with the Jewish people or religion. Contributors interested in submitting work not immediately or obviously of interest to broad English-speaking Jewish audiences should address this in their pitch.

Please send an email to editors@readsanctuary.com with the subject line “Pitch: [a few words summarizing your topic]” and brief pitch describing the piece you would like to write and its relevance to American Jewish discourse, as well as a few words about yourself. If you have published work, please attach a file or link to the email; however, we welcome submissions from contributors who have not yet published. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis; we aim to review all submissions within two weeks. Please feel free to follow up after this time if we have not responded. We are not able to compensate contributors at this time.

Guidelines for writing about Israel/Palestine

Sanctuary welcomes work on all aspects of life in Israel and Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian relations. In the interest of generating constructive discourse that is accessible to as many readers as possible, we require that submissions align with the following faith-based principles:

  1. Respect for the life and human rights of all persons living in Israel and Palestine.
  2. Respect for the meaning and sanctity of the land of Israel/Palestine and its holy sites in the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and indigenous Middle Eastern faith traditions.
  3. Respect for the ancestral and legal property rights of Palestinians and Israelis who rightfully and ethically inherited or acquired land in Israel/Palestine. This does not include land that was seized or occupied by either party at any point in violation of international law or the ethical and religious obligations to respect ancestral and familial property rights, even if it was acquired or inherited lawfully after this point.
  4. Respect for international law as it pertains to issues of ethical and moral concern, including conduct of war and land ownership and occupation in Israel/Palestine.
  5. Acknowledgment of war and physical violence as a last resort permissible only for the purpose of self-defense.
  6. Acknowledgment of an unequivocal religious prohibition against harming non-combatants in the course of war except in exigent circumstances of self-defense, after exhausting all other options and careful ethical consideration. Deliberate or negligent harm to non-combatants is unequivocally prohibited without exception. 
  7. Commitment to a just, lasting peace for all persons living in Israel and Palestine.

In addition to the above requirements, we will prioritize work that:

  • Engages with the substance of a topic or question rather than solely its ideological associations and implications.
  • Embraces an appropriate balance of realism and idealism in discussing policy proposals related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  • Avoids restating commonplace or timeworn ideas or policy proposals.
  • Avoids generalization about or superficial analyses of ideological approaches to Israel-Palestine, including dismissing ideas or persons due to nominal association with Zionism, non-Zionism, or anti-Zionism. Excluded from this are ideologies and movements that are constitutively in opposition to normative religious ethics, such as Kahanism and Salafi jihadism.
  • Avoids generalizations and stereotypes about Palestinians or Israelis.
  • For work based in historical research, endeavors to account for both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives on contested or ambiguous issues in the gathering and presentation of sources, unless the work is explicitly focused on a Palestinian or Israeli perspective. Contributors who wish to prioritize Palestinian or Israeli sources or data on a particular topic (excluding the latter exception above) should clearly communicate their affinities to the relevant perspective to facilitate maximal clarity for readers.

Guidelines for writing divrei Torah

  • Submissions should provide a fresh, timely reading or perspective on a religious text, concept, or aspect of Jewish faith and practice. Surveys or summaries of topics without a central argument or relevance to broad Jewish audiences will not be considered. This includes moralistic, apologetic, and sermonizing work.
  • Submissions should avoid making normative or prescriptive claims about halakha (Jewish law and practice) and Jewish theology, or otherwise assuming anything about readers' personal faith and practice. Broad surveys of topics must include sources from across Jewish denominations and at least two Jewish ethnic groups (e.g. Ashkenazi and Sepharadi). Contributors may choose to focus on a particular group's approach to a topic (e.g. Orthodox approaches to environmental justice), but must make their frame of reference clear to readers from the outset.
  • Submissions about Scripture, such as divrei Torah on the weekly parashah (Torah portion), should respect a diversity of approaches to its authorship while acknowledging the sanctity ascribed to it by many traditional Jews, past and present.
  • Please translate all Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, and Ladino words in parentheses following the first use of the word, and provide translations for all non-English sources cited in-text.