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Dr. Avraham (Alan) Rosen is the author or editor of fourteen books. He is most recently the author of The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018); The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford UP, 2010; updated paper edition 2012), and Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English (U of Nebraska P, paper 2008).

Rosen introduces There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays In Honor of David Roskies by reflecting on how Jewish speech—the spoken word, the vibrating resonance of uttered sound—finds its way back into text.

The Jewish Labor Bund was a major force in Russian Jewish life, expanding the political arena to be more democratic in nature and driving the creation of a new political and economic discourse in Yiddish. So I was shocked to learn that in 1910, the Bund had a mere 609 members—down from approximately 35,000 five years earlier. The speed with which the Bund and other Jewish political parties in the Russian Empire could rise, fall, and rise again reflects the pressures the community was under, resulting in both sober caution and daring, desperate dreams.