Volume XXI of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry marks sixty years since the end of the Second World War and forty years since the Second Vatican Council's efforts to revamp Church relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History offers a collection of new scholarship on the nature of the Jewish-Catholic encounter between 1945 and 2005, with an emphasis on how this relationship has emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust.

The Studies in Contemporary Jewry series is edited by Jonathan Frankel, Eli Lederhendler, Peter Y. Medding, and Ezra Mendelsohn, who teach Jewish history, society, and politics at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Eli Lederhendler, the editor of Volume XXI, is the Stephen S. Wise Professor of American Jewish History and Institutions at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University. He is the author of New York Jews and the Decline of the Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970, among other titles.