Alona Bach

"Incomplete mourning, being unable to fully talk about what was lost, means that you’re perpetually haunted."

— @rokhl.bsky.social on ghosts, IRB forms, Purim shpiels, perfume, and her new play Shtumer Shabes.

Raboysay (/robotsay 🤖)!

One more week to send us your Yiddish sci-fi submissions. We're especially keen for pitches for the blog and pedagogy sections — on incorporating Yiddish sci-fi into the classroom, interviews, reviews, blog-length thoughts on techno-messianism or dys/utopia, and more!

Fellowship The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, curated by leading Jewish studies scholars, is an anthology of texts and images containing thousands of sources—and growing.

#PosenLibrary is introducing a new initiative - Posen Library Digital Curriculum Development Fellowship, to help create educational materials for Posen Library digital platform.

For more info:
www.posenlibrary.com/fellowship

#DHJewish #JewishEducation #CurriculumDevelopment

Send us your airships, your dystopias, your wired masses yearning to breathe free—af yidish!

Submissions for our @ingeveb.bsky.social special issue on Yiddish sci-fi are due Mon, 28 April.

(Of course the real Kundes cartoon of the moment is still: bsky.app/profile/bach...)

The cartoon from the back of the page: a Jewish jester (the Kundes mascot) and a devil, laughing and pointing at the reader. The caption reads (with backwards English letters, so it would appear forwards when held up to the light from the other side) "April Fool".

(The cartoon in question, printed on the back of the grey box, one page later in the magazine)

—Der groyser kundes [March 31, 1911], p. 12.

Scan of old magazine clipping. A grey box. Underneath, a caption in Yiddish: Take two teaspoons of cold milk, mix with two teaspoons of cold water, squeeze in four drops of lemon juice and mix well. Then dip a clean handkerchief in the fluid and lightly dampen this empty area. Then hold it against the sun and you'll see a cartoon.

A Yiddish prank of yore: "Take 2 tsp of cold milk, mix w/ 2 tsp of cold water, squeeze in 4 drops of lemon juice & mix well. Dip a clean handkerchief in the fluid & lightly dampen empty area. Hold it against the sun & you'll see a cartoon."

—Der groyser kundes (March 31, 1911), p. 11.

We publish:
+ long-form pieces (~3–4k words/equivalent, flexible genre);
+ “BroadcaSTS” (<300 words);
+ “From the Source” (showcasing & contextualizing a primary source, ideally with suggestions for how it might be used in classrooms).

We'd love to hear from you! contrastsmagazine.github.io

Screenshot of three bullet-point paragraphs of text from the CFP, reading: Entrances and Exits: If portals are entryways into other worlds, timelines, and relationalities, what does it mean to open a portal—and to close it? How do discourses, representations, and architectures of openings (and closings) inspire and confine access to other possibilities for life? Travel, Space, and Time: How do portals compress, interrupt, and transmute space and time? How do these transmutations generate or foreclose opportunities to remake their very fabric? How do particular technologies/documents/objects/media modulate movement between and through spacetime? Liminality, Thresholds, and Borderlands: How does attention to portals reveal the politics and potentialities of spaces and states in-between, and what does the state of liminality reveal about worlds that it shuffles between? What portals (have) enable(d) entry into worlds so radically different than their “before” that they preclude any return? What are the social, emotional, spiritual, political, or technological preconditions for crossing through a portal? What are the stories of science, technology, or medicine on the cusp of possibility?

We invite submissions on "portals" from emerging scholars both within academia (undergrads through early-career scholars) and without (including artists & designers). We are keen to feature STS-adjacent work in a wide range of forms & genres—narrative nonfiction, visual essays, interviews, & beyond.

Publicity graphic. The background photo depicts a cube with a mysterious opening, nestled in foliage. The graphic has the Contrasts logo and website, and says issue one, portals, pitches due March first.

CFP for ContraSTS / Issue: "Portals" / due March 1

ContraSTS is an online magazine run by MIT graduate students, featuring public-facing #STS and #histSTM works at the intersections of science, technology, and society.

More info & pitch: contrastsmagazine.github.io

Rainbow-ified scan of a cartoon and poem from an old Yiddish magazine, titled Ven mashiekh vet kumen. The illustration shows an old-timey airship, with a tzitzit flag and a menora at the front, carrying two religious Jews into the sky while a crowd below waves.

The image in the CFP comes from Der groyser kun­des 1, no. 20 (Sep­tem­ber 25, 1909), p. 5. Alt text below! buff.ly/416QaB1

Screenshot of CFP listing: The geographies and empires of Yiddish science fiction worlds. Time-travel in contemporary Haredi Yiddish writing. Utopia, dystopia and heterotopia. Histories and politics of Yiddish science fiction publishing. Intersections of Yiddish techno-imaginaries with Jewish futurities (prophesy, mysticism, messianism). Theorizations of the Yiddish/Jewish science fiction anthology. Yiddish inflections in contemporary non-Yiddish-language science fiction. Material/visual expressions of Yiddish futures.

I'm excited to be co-editing this issue with Dalia Wolfson & Sebastian Schulman. We're looking for: short essays, reviews, interviews, pedagogical materials, and translations (including miniyaturn—original 100-250־word Yiddish mini-sci-fi narratives)—on the themes below, and beyond!

What other social and technological futures have we imagined, feared, hoped for—af yidish? Help us imagine, remember, and consider alternative possibilities by submitting to @ingeveb.bsky.social 's special issue on #Yiddish #scifi.

Full CFP: ingeveb.org/blog/call-fo...

Margaret Partridge (left) Margaret Rowbotham (right) in black and white headshots from late 1920s/early 1930s.

In Praise of Retirement by the Margarets R&P

Margaret Partridge bit.ly/3anO3yg & Margaret Rowbotham en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margare... Partners in life & #engineering 1962 wrote joint letter of grandmotherly advice on joys of retirement: designing sports pavilion, converting stately home in2 boys school. Buried together #LGBTHM24 #ValentinesDay

מוראדיק הײַנטצײַטיק
מיטן טראָפּ אויף מוראדיק

This sounds like a wonderful project — Haslett's correspondence is fascinating, lively, and a crucial part of UK engineering/electric history (with the WES, EAW, and beyond!). #histSTM

It was such an amazing time organizing @farbindungen.bsky.social 2026 with these incredible people!

Notes and sketches under the heading "Bad Yiddish". Featuring portraits of two men, speech bubbles, scrawled notes, a shund-y border.

A "Bad Yiddish" keynote @farbindungen.bsky.social , ft. Saul Zaritt on shund and cultural porousness & Natan M. Meir on minhag and the everyday histories "hidden in plain sight". #Farbindungen25

A sketch with notes in Yiddish letters, titled Farbindungen panel 1, with yellow and teal details, a streetscape, a hasty Freud and a mini-Bashevis.

#Farbindungen25 panel 1 — underworlds, shund, and disappointments.

הוראַ!!! אין אַ גוטער שעה, װי מע זאָגט!

Really looking forward to this #Farbindungen25 panel on Yiddish theater, featuring Rebecca Turner on Jane Rose's NIT MIT ALEMEN (a favorite play!), @bluma.bsky.social on Leivick (!!), and Yael Horowitz on reviving a Polish Yiddish cabaret tune/dance, with @ruthieabeliovich.bsky.social moderating.

Fan studies, Crisco recipes, Yiddish lesboerotica — what more could you ask for in a #Farbindungen25 panel on "Practice as Method"? And with the eyn-un-eyntsike @evejochnowitz.bsky.social moderating, at that! Join us virtually by registering here: bit.ly/registerfarb...

A picture of Rebecca Weingart, with a bio and panel details. Long description linked in reply.

A picture of Uri Horesh, with a bio and panel details. Long description linked in the reply.

A picture of Pamela Brenner, with a bio and panel details. Long description linked in the reply.

A picture of Sunny Yudkoff, with a bio and panel details. Long description linked in the reply.

Introducing! מיר שטעלן פֿאָר!
The second panel of #Farbindungen25 is "Dos heyst taytsh? Unfaithful Translation." Featuring Rebecca Weingart, Uri Horesh, and Pamela Brenner, with Sunny Yudkoff. Register today, link in bio!

Yiddish cartoon showing Uncle Sam sitting dejectedly, head in hands, on the steps of a grand building labelled "American Institutions, American Traditions." A copy of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are lying by his side.

"Aroysgeshtelt."

—Cartoon from April 23, 1920, by Lola (Leon Israel) in Der groyser kundes, a #Yiddish biweekly humor magazine, p. 3.

This is such a helpful and long overdue piece that demonstrates @annsplaining.bsky.social’s meticulous research about women’s spirituality and spiritual leadership in Jewish Eastern Europe.

Black and white (woodcut?) print of man with cap and large beard, working intently at table with springs and other fiddly bits. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Kh. M. Faynshteyn, Feter Zishe.

Black and white (woodcut?) print of thin man with cap, short dark beard, and spectacles. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Kh. M. Faynshteyn, Feter Fole.

Angular drawing of young, skinny man with large eyes, in profile from the waist up. He wears a cap, holds a book, and looks forward towards the right edge of the paper. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Tsalke.

Illustration of man in profile, a portrait from the shoulders up. He has a dark cap, a pointed nose, and prominent adam's apple, and a small dark beard extending from his chin. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Feter Itshe.

1930s illustrations of Zelmenyaner characters: Uncle Zishe, Uncle Folye, Uncle Itshe, and Tsalke.

- Zishe & Fole by Kh. M. Faynshteyn, reprinted in Dos vort [Kovne/Kaunas] (Feb 7, 1936).
- Itshe & Tsalke in Shtraln [biweekly children's magazine] (1 June, 1938), p14.
Via NLI/HJP.

Graphic of schedule for Farbindungen 2025, day 1. A text-only schedule is included in the post above, which includes one line of Yiddish text in Panel 1, but is otherwise written in Roman characters.

Graphic of schedule for Farbindungen 2025, day 2.

#Farbindungen25 Bad Yiddish is in just two weeks!

Take a look at the full schedule below to learn more about this year's panels, workshops, and keynote. The conference runs February 2-3.

Register here - bit.ly/registerfarbindungen25
Full-text schedule - bit.ly/Farbindungen...

I believe that here "honorar mesig [=mesik]" means: "Moderate fee/honorarium."

While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish "Bashevis' Demons" stages three stories from Isaac Bashevis Singer, from the occult to the musings of a rooster.

"In the confluence of Christmas and Hanukkah, in the days of the Yiddish New York festival, [Isaac Bashevis] Singer's ghosts and his language live on to haunt us."

forward.com/culture/thea...

Playing until Jan 15 @ Theatre 154.

Marina Mayorski reviews Ayelet Brinn's A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press:

"A Revolution in Type offers a timely and forceful contribution to the study of Jewish history, culture, and gender."

https://buff.ly/3DiHj76