Jul 11, 2019
Tayere leyeners, Dear readers:
As our fourth publishing year comes to a close, we want to thank you for all of your support as we continue to build scholarship and community around Yiddish Studies. Thank you to everyone who has read our work, shared it with a friend, taught it in a classroom, conversed about it, written about it, and cared about it. Thank you to our donors who make all of our work possible, our editorial board and board of directors who share their time and energy generously with us, and our talented contributors.
We want to take some time to reflect with you about 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.
BY THE NUMBERS
On the day we launched, five years ago, almost 1000 people visited the site. Today, In geveb welcomes readers from around the world - over sixty countries just this week! (hello to our reader in Luxembourg!) - including over 2,800 followers on Facebook, over 1,300 followers on Twitter, and an average of 6,300 unique visitors to our website each month.
This past year we published 33 blog posts, 10 pedagogical resources and reflections, 10 academic book reviews, 14 translations, and 10 peer reviewed academic articles. This is in line with our goal to bring readers new content every week - one of the ways In geveb works to combine the best of academic journals and online publications. You can read about the most popular pieces this year here!
SHEPN NAKHES
Beyond the continuing expansion of our reading community, there is so much that we are proud of this year. From writing that imagines an idealized future to writing that negotiates relationships between the present and the past, we have published a wide range of translations, scholarship, reviews, reflections, and pedagogical resources.
We are proud to have continued initiatives from previous years that you have come to expect and depend on, such as our Yiddish summer programs roundup and our bibliography of new Yiddish Studies scholarship. We have compiled new teaching guides to enhance your pedagogical repertoire. We have continued to build on the Milgroym Project, with new translations from the interwar Yiddish literary journal. And we have spent countless hours laughing together to perfect our Purim issue.
We’ve done all this while continuing to expand our vision for the journal by establishing new series such as our now annual bibliography of newly published translations from Yiddish, putting out calls for new special issues, and encouraging submissions from contributors who have never before written for us.
We’ve also expanded our team to include an undergraduate intern, who has brought new energy to our work and encouraged us to focus on the perspectives of students as well as that of teachers. Next year, we are looking forward to welcoming a new Managing Editor/Development Associate and Peer Review Editorial Associate.
CELEBRATIONS
This year we celebrated In geveb’s community with three fundraising house parties: in Belmont, Massachussetts, Seattle, Washington, and most recently in Chicago, Illinois. A hearty thank you to all those who came, and especially those who shared their homes with us for these events! Just as with our previous parties in New York, these events are meaningful for us far beyond the funds they raise. As an online publication, we love every opportunity to see what the In geveb community looks like in person. If you are interested in hosting a house party or think we should organize one in your city next year, please contact us!
At our Chicago party this June, Kestutis Nakas, writer, performer, director, and Professor of Theatre at Roosevelt University, performed selections from literary translations published in our journal. It was a phenomenal performance and cartoonist Ken Krimstein, who was in attendance at the event, shared with us this sketch:
You won’t want to miss this short excerpt of Kestutis’s recitation of Getsl Selikovitch’s “A Tomato’s Last Good Deeds,” translated by Michael Shapiro:
A GIFT FOR YOU
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.
We are using this end-of-year letter as an opportunity to ask you to make a contribution to In geveb to support our work. As a token of our thanks, we are offering anyone who donates $75 or more by October 1, 2019 an opportunity to win a giclée print and enlargement of a tapestry by textile artist Berit Engen (whose work was featured on In geveb earlier this year). Thank you, Berit, for this generous donation! If you are interested in making a similar in-kind donation to be raffled at a fundraising party or appeal, please let us know.
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.
A Fiddler in His Dance
2010
7” x 6”
While the branches of birch trees are often grey, the thin and straight trunks are white. Standing in the midst of a birch forest is like standing among long, white, silk stockings suspended from God’s clothesline. And watching the dance among trees is like watching the fiddler’s movements continuously appear and disappear. Half an arm, half a foot, in and out of view, like a dance behind bars.
ONWARD
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!
The editors of In geveb anxiously await your next submission. Don’t file away that conference paper from Warsaw, Jerusalem, or AJS; send us your abstract! Our pedagogy section is looking for your reflections on syllabi, teaching guides for significant texts or topics, and your best exercises for the language classroom. Don’t set aside your painstaking translation of an obscure newspaper article or that poem you agonized over in your leyenkrayz: send us the translation! And our blog is always looking for interesting, popularly oriented discoveries, reviews of music and theater, opinions, and interviews to bring Yiddish to new audiences.
So enjoy your summer programs, your summer travel, your summer writing and your summer reading (we hope you’re reading that backlog of In geveb pieces you haven’t had a chance to look at yet!) We’ll be back soon! Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing you “in geveb.”
Vayter,
The Editors
