Kh. Goldberg engraving for Y. Opatoshu, Der Mishpet. Shul Bibliotek, no. 21. (Warsaw: Kultur Lige, 1922), p. 15. via Florida Atlantic University Digital Library.
Tayere leyeners, Dear readers:
It has been quite a year for all of us, one of challenge and uncertainty as well as accomplishment and promise.
In some ways, we at In geveb have been well situated to tackle the challenges of our moment because we are a born-digital publication and much of our operations have remained consistent throughout the pandemic. Nevertheless, as individuals, all of the editors at In geveb have struggled with the ways that the pandemic has upended our lives, some of us facing loneliness, others working from home while caring for children, all of us finding it hard to discern whether we are working from home or simply living at work. Through these struggles, we have all been enormously grateful to have work we find meaningful and important: building our platform for Yiddish scholarship, community, resources, and translations.
As we head into our summer publishing break, we want to express our gratitude to all of the readers and supporters who make our work possible and worthwhile. If you have read something we published and spent time talking about it or thinking about it, if you have shared it with a friend, if you have donated to us, cited us, sent us your writing—a hartsikn dank.
We also want to take some time to reflect with you on all that we have accomplished this year, tell you about some of our plans for the future, and ask you to continue to share in our work.
A YEAR AT IN GEVEB BY THE NUMBERS
This year, we have welcomed roughly 2,000 readers to our site each week. Many of our readers are located in the United States, but our audience demonstrates our global reach: there are In geveb readers in places as widespread as Israel, Germany, Australia, Poland, and Brazil. The top cities from which our readers access us are: New York, Chicago, Tel Aviv, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Our readers are researchers, teachers, students, translators, and enthusiasts.
We have been very busy at In geveb this year, publishing 11 translations, 26 blog essays, 11 book reviews, 12 briv funem arkhiv pieces highlighting archival finds, 10 pedagogy posts, and a whopping 25 peer reviewed academic articles. We’ve covered topics from advice for teaching Yiddish online to the state of Yiddish Studies in China, from children’s literature to memoir, from the Yiddish-infused writing of Howard Jacobson to design elements of the Jewish cultural journal Rimon / Milgroym Milgroym, and so much more.
Among all of the excellent writing we have published this year, several achievements stand out:
- We launched two special issues of peer-reviewed scholarship: Translation: Poetics, Negotiation, Tradaptation, edited by Olaf Terpitz and Marianne Windsperger, and “There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things”: Essays in Honor of David Roskies, edited by Avraham Rosen and Jillian Davidson.
- We began our Briv funem arkhiv series that allows scholars to share an object they have found in their research and offer some context to help our readers understand its significance. The breadth of archival finds and of contributors has brought fresh variety to our journal and we are delighted by the success of the series, which we plan to continue next year.
- We have published a number of translations and reflections dedicated to the topic of women’s writing in Yiddish, including Anita Norich’s reflection on teaching and translating prose by women; Irena Klepfisz’s personal essay about her writing and activism on behalf of the Yiddish language and Yiddish women’s culture; an interview with Goldie Morgentaler about her new translation of her mother Chava Rosenfarb’s writing; Nicholas Heskes’s presentation of his great-grandmother Dora Schulner’s notebooks; translations of work by Chana Blankstein, Sarah Reisen, and Miriam Ulinover; Michaela Foster’s reflections on creating a cartoon about female characters in Yiddish literature for an undergraduate class; and areview of recent Polish scholarship about women’s writing in Yiddish.
- We continued initiatives from previous years that you have come to expect and depend on, such as our Yiddish summer programs roundup (which we updated to reflect COVID-related changes) and our bibliography of new translations from Yiddish. And we harnessed our combined comedic powers to bring you a robust Purim issue.
We’ve also expanded our team to include our new Managing Editor/Development Associate, Cassandra Euphrat Weston, and Peer Review Editorial Associate, LeiAnna Xenia Hamel, whose unflagging work is reflected in all the above accomplishments.
image from Edmondo DeAmicis, Dos gute kind. (Warsaw: Mayselekh, 1912), via Florida Atlantic University Digital Library Collections.
GIVING TO IN GEVEB
All of this would not be possible without our donors. In a time when cultural and scholarly labor is often underfunded or not funded at all, our goal has been to compensate the work of editors, bloggers, and translators to the best of our ability, especially early-career academics, contingent faculty, and independent scholars. We are grateful to the individual donors and charitable foundations that make this possible.
If you have read, enjoyed, or learned from our work at In geveb, please consider making a contribution. Your donation will go directly back into the work we do—it will pay our editors and our contributors, cover the costs of web hosting and support, help us bring in new editorial staff, commission new writing, and plan new initiatives. Thank you for your generosity.
We also encourage you to consider signing up to make a small monthly contribution to In geveb. We’ll send a thank you gift of a dozen In geveb pencils to every new monthly donor.
SEND US YOUR WRITING!
We know you’ll miss us over our summer publishing break, but don’t worry—we’ll be back in the fall with terrific new material. And some of it could be written by you!
We encourage you to send us your pitches and your writing throughout the summer and beyond. We have recently updated our submission guidelines for increased clarity and transparency and we hope you’ll consult them to get a sense of what we are looking for. In our submission process, we aim to pay critical attention to gender, racial, religious, and career diversity. We are committed, in all sections of the journal, to leveraging our digital format and flexible publishing schedule to accommodate contributors from a variety of backgrounds and professional situations, especially those who face structural barriers to publication within and outside academia. We encourage all potential contributors to be in touch with section editors with questions concerning content, scope, or queries regarding developmental editing. We also welcome feedback on how we can make our submission and publication process more equitable and inclusive.
We accept writing on a rolling basis. We can’t wait to hear from you and read your work.
We know it’s an unusual summer for many of you, and a difficult one. But we hope you are able to enjoy your summer writing, your summer sun, your summer Zoom sessions with friends and family, and your summer reading (like that backlog of In geveb pieces you haven’t had a chance to look at yet!). We wish you strength in your struggles, passion for your protests, safety, good health, and a community you can rely on.
We’ll be back soon! Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing you “in geveb.”
Vayter,
The In geveb editorial team
