The Fourth Gospel is at the same time a sublime work that has inspired and enriched the faith of countless Christians and a problematic text that has provided potent anti-Jewish imagery exploited in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic discourse over the course of two millennia. The Fourth Gospel contains approximately 70 references to hoi ioudaioi, a designation most often (and best) translated as "the Jews." Several of these references are neutral or descriptive, referring to Jewish festivals or specific practices, and some depict individual Jews or Jewish groups as interested in Jesus' message. The vast majority, however, express a negative or even hostile stance towards the Jews. These passages express several themes that became central to Christian anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic discourse. These include the charge of deicide - killing God - and the claim that the Jews have the devil as their father (8:44). The essays in this book address both the Gospel's stance towards the Jews and the Gospel's impact on Jewish-Christian relations from antiquity to the present day, in a range of media, including sermons, iconography, art, music, and film. A short volume of collected essays cannot hope to address the full history of the Fourth Gospel's impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this volume will contribute to the efforts of Christians and Jews alike to find ways to appreciate what is good and life-affirming about the Gospel of John, while also acknowledging the damaging impact of its portrayal of Jews as the children of Satan and the killers of Christ. Only when Christians disavow this portrayal can the Gospel of John continue to be a true source of inspiration and perhaps even a path forward in the relationships between Jews and Christians in the modern world.

With the new era of 8-10 m telescopes the power to spectroscopically examine the light of fainter and more distant targets has taken a 'photon' leap. It is now becoming routinely possible to obtain high signal-to-noise spectra of very distant objects and to attempt the determination of their abundances. The motivation for a workshop on this topic could be summarized thus: Do we understand enough about chemical abundances at zero redshift to trust any conclusions on chem- ical evolution at high redshift? Given our observational background in gaseous nebulae, we thought at first in terms of a workshop largcly devoted to the inter- stellar medium. However, we were encouraged by Jacqueline Bergeron and Alvio Renzini to pitch the theme much wider. The members of the Scientific Organiz- ing Committee (Francoise Combes, Don Garnett, Guinevere Kauffmann, Claus Leitherer, Danny Lennon, Max Pettini, Peter Shaver, Elena Terlevich and David Tytler), under the chair of John Mathis, made sure that we kept the conference broad in scope. We thank them for their encouragement and advice. Informally the working title for the conference thus became "High and low Z from low to high z" (or Z@O