Feb 18, 2025
In November 2013, just prior to our occasional Brooklyn-to-Worcester Thanksgiving carpool, Saul Zaritt sent me an email to gauge my interest in a new, embryonic online journal of Yiddish studies. Perhaps sensing my reluctant theory-averse soul, he wrote, “We need more historians, and not just literature people, involved!”
I couldn’t resist a new project and joined the core editorial group for the first years of In geveb’s existence. Working as a scholar can be a fairly solitary endeavor at times, and some of my best memories from those years are of being part of an energetic team: meeting with web designers, writing grant applications, interviewing minor celebrities, and going on field trips to pick out stationary. When I stepped out of that position, I was happy to maintain my connection to In geveb as a member of the editorial board. Now, I am thrilled to return to the deep end in my new role as a Peer Review Editor, alongside Aya Elyada and Matt Johnson.
A bit about me: I’m a historian by training, and my work deals mainly with Jewish social and cultural history in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland. My first book, a study of Polish Jewish museum-making, will be out in June, and my second project is about vocational education for Polish Jewish girls in the interwar period. As the only historian of Jewish life at my university, I get to teach much more broadly, offering courses on Eastern European history, the broad swath of Jewish history, Jewish immigration, and multiple courses on the Holocaust. I wrote about one of my courses, an exploration of the representations of Jewish Eastern Europe, here. Yiddish sources are central to both my research and teaching. I look forward to working in the peer review section and bringing my academic perspectives to the editorial team.
Thorough, constructive, timely peer review is essential both to an academic journal’s functioning as well as to the work of scholars generally. Perhaps the feared “Reviewer Number Two” has always been around, but recently, I have heard peer review horror stories from colleagues—reviews that made no sense, which were later found to likely have been generated by AI, missing reviews that sunk a tenure dossier, cruel reviews without constructive comments. From my earlier involvement with In geveb, I know our processes are designed to encourage constructive feedback and critical attention, and I’m very happy to be working on a team with good editorial values.
I’m so happy to be back in closer relationship with In geveb, and I’m looking forward to learning this side of the journal from Aya and Matt!
