Oh, how we’ve missed you

We know how passionately and earnestly you love In geveb. Did you miss us while we were on summer break? Oh, how we’ve missed you, our readers. It’s so good to be with you again. How we’ve been yearning for you these long and restful summer months!

But now we’re back, and you won’t have to spend even a moment without the brilliant, insightful, and hilarious approaches to Yiddish Studies you’ve come to depend on In geveb for. Read on for news about our editorial staff, writing you can look forward to, upcoming events, information about submissions.

Welcoming new Ingevebnikes

We are pleased to announce three new members of our peer review editorial team!

Aya Elyada and Matthew Johnson will join Josh Lambert as peer review editors.

Aya Elyada is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fields of interest are German and German-Jewish history and culture; Christian-Jewish relations; Yiddish language and literature; and the social and cultural history of language and translation. Her recent publications include papers in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Past and Present, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and the Jewish Quarterly Review. Her book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, was published in 2012 by Stanford University Press. Her current book project discusses the place of Old Yiddish literature in modern German-Jewish culture.

Matthew Johnson is Senior Lecturer and Director of Yiddish and Ashkenazic Studies at Ohio State University. He is currently working on a book project, Faltering Language: On German-Yiddish Literature, which demonstrates how the intersection between German and Yiddish became an important but largely forgotten site of cultural production from around 1900 to the present. He has also written on topics such as Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s unfinished poetry, the reception history of Glikl’s memoirs, and Paul Celan’s translation of an essay by James Baldwin. Johnson received his Ph.D. from the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago in 2022. He previously studied at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Freie Universität Berlin, and New York University.

Elena Hoffenberg will be serving this year as peer review associate editor. She is a PhD student in modern Jewish history at the University of Chicago. Her work examines the social and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on the history of gender, sexuality, and the family.

We’re also welcoming a new Development Associate, Jeremy Sarna.

Jeremy Sarna is a recent graduate of Boston University, with an MS in Arts Administration. A former recording engineer, who worked for twenty years at New England Conservatory, he comes to Yiddish via Boston’s lively klezmer scene. He brings much needed knowledge of non-profit management and fundraising to our team and will help our journal grow and sustain itself into the future.

We are looking forward to the ways these new team members will grow and shape our journal!

New writing in store for you

We have a great publication year planned that will help keep you connected to the world of Yiddish studies through reviews, new research, translations, pedagogical materials, and more.

You can look forward to seeing book review essays from across the spectrum of academic texts and literary translations, interviews and conversations with cultural activists in the world of Yiddish, teaching guides, and academic articles. We are excited to feature work by authors in a variety of career stages and covering a wide breadth of topics and approaches. In the coming weeks you can look forward to reading academic articles by historians Gennady Estraikh and Brett Winestock, a reflection on translating troubling Yiddish texts by Giovanna Truong, an undergraduate student at Yale University, a discussion of a translation of a children’s poem as a resource for teaching Yiddish to the very young, by Beth Dwoskin, and a translation of an Avrom Sutzkever poem by Annabel Cohen. We’re also looking forward to publishing the findings of two polls we ran during the spring on particularly popular hot-button topics in Yiddish pedagogy: Namely, polls on Yiddish Duolingo and Zionism and Anti-Zionism in the Yiddish class room. Keep an eye out!

We’re also a proud co-sponsor of “Di froyen: Celebrating the Women of Yiddish Literature,” an educational program and celebration to be held November 4-6, 2022 at the Yiddish Book Center. This gathering honors the work that so many of us at In geveb and across the world of Yiddish scholarship and cultural activism have been doing to lift up the voices of Yiddish women writers in recent years, bolstered by the foundation of feminists who assembled for the original “Froyen” conference in 1995.

Share your work with us

We’re accepting submissions across our website, and we eagerly await your pitches.

In our submission process we aim to pay critical attention to gender, racial, religious, and career diversity. We welcome submissions in English or in Yiddish (if submissions are in Yiddish we will translate them and publish bilingually). 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 or scope, or queries regarding developmental editing. We also welcome feedback on how we can make our submission and publication process more equitable and inclusive. You can read our full submissions guidelines here.

Our blog is seeking interviews, personal essays, listicles, reports about ongoing research, reviews of Yiddish music, theater, and other cultural events (in-person or virtual), plus any other thrilling, surprising, personal, or critical observations about all corners of the Yiddish world. Send pitches, queries, and musings to [email protected].

In particular, the blog is looking for submissions to the Briv funem arkhiv (Letters from the Archive) series. We are seeking short reflections that contextualize and explain the significance of an artifact (which can be something you accessed virtually!) A longer description of what we are looking for can be found here.

The Pedagogy section is open and eager for submissions of reflections, activities, worksheets, and syllabi from your Yiddish-related classes. We are also interested in critical biographical essays and other material that would allow us to build a repository of reference material for pedagogical purposes. In addition, we continue to welcome teaching guides around materials or themes on our site, as well as pedagogy polls. We welcome submissions from teachers, students, and anyone who has ideas about teaching with or about Yiddish. Send your pitches, inquiries, and materials to [email protected].

The Articles section of In geveb welcomes your submissions for peer review, as well as proposals for book reviews. We encourage submissions from a wide variety of disciplines related to Yiddish studies, including (but not limited to) history, linguistics, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, and literature. Please email [email protected] if you would like to propose a book review, recommend a book for us to review, or submit an article.

Submissions for our Translation section are currently open. We welcome translations of a wide variety of genres and subjects, and warmly invite first-time translators as well as veterans to send us their work. The publication process for translations is rigorous and lengthy, and we appreciate your patience as we process and evaluate your submissions. Send your inquiries and your work to [email protected].

All of us at In geveb are looking forward to sharing another year with you!

Support In geveb!

Please consider making a contribution to In geveb to support our work. Your support for our work makes an enormous difference. If you are able, please help ensure another rich, provocative, and diverse year of writing on all things Yiddish by signing up to make a small monthly contribution or a one time donation.

You can also support In geveb by shopping at our In geveb store on Redbubble. In geveb receives 20% of your purchase.

Your donation will enable In geveb to be a central address for the study of all things Yiddish—a digital forum for discussions of Yiddish literature, language, and culture, and the home for the next generation of Yiddish scholarship. We are grateful for your continuing support of our work in Yiddish language and culture.

We missed you and are glad to be back in your feeds, on your screens, and especially in your minds and hearts.

Yours in yidishkayt,

The In geveb team