Alona Bach

ALL THAT DIES IN APRIL | Kirkus Reviews A woman sets off from her mountain home in search of the ocean and the possibility of a better life.

Mariana Travacio's All That Dies in April, perhaps? A brief (164pp) and haunting multiperspective novel about family, migration, and the vulnerabilities (and possibilities) of in/stability: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

Cartoon-stylized image of a white woman with shoulder length blond hair against a graph paper background. Text is the bio of Caroline Luce.

Image of a white woman with shoulder length gray hair wearing a blue satin coat and hat, against a graph paper background. Text is the bio of Miriam Udel.

Introducing our keynote speakers for Farbindungen 2026: Yiddish at Work, taking place Feb 15th-16th, virtually. We're beyond excited and honored to have Caroline Luce and Miriam Udel headlining our program this year. Call for papers and submission form can be found at bit.ly/Farbindungen26Submission

Electrical Engineering in Yiddish: The Vilna Technicum (and Beyond) By Alona Bach, Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Short-Term Graduate Public History Fellow Electrical Engineering in Yiddish: The Vilna Technicum (and Beyond) “Up to this point, there has not been a single b

What do the “Father of the Bund” & a Yiddish electrical engineering textbook have in common?

Find out: blog.cjh.org/index.php/20...

A groysn dank to YIVO archivist Jess Podhorcer & the CJH for the chance to write about the Vilna Technicum and the making of Yiddish-speaking engineers.

Scientific Literature in the Yiddish Classroom: A Lesson Based on a Page from a Chemistry Textbook | In geveb Working with authentic material from Yiddish scientific and technical textbooks enables teachers to sharpen students’ grammatical and lexical awareness and to h

NEW Pedagogy piece: Scientific Literature in the Yiddish Classroom

If you use this material in your classroom--let us know! 🦚

ingeveb.org/pedagogy/sci...

A graphic reading: Viewportal (al in parentheses) Fictions. On abstraction and the unmaking of reality through Rhino. Nandini Goel. Quote: To reckon with what we must remember while designing, we must first address what our Rhino viewport conditions us to forget.

Nandini Goel on architecture's abstractions, and what the Rhino viewport reveals and obscures.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/view...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social

A graphic reading: Life at the Wire. Molly Brodsky. Quote: The eruv is not just The Wire; it is The Wiring—stringing fences and maintainers and observers and laws and spaces into a connected knotty mixture. Contrasts 01. Portals.

Molly Brodsky's lyrical meditation on eruvin considers not only the physical structure of an eruv—its components, its vulnerabilities—but also how it coheres community.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/life-at-the-wire/
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social

A graphic reading: Thereafter, we lingered. Kelso Dunman. Quote: Hovering in the balm of September 2007, I wonder who was inside the house when Google's street view car rolled by and froze my childhood in time. Contrasts 1. Portals.

Kelsi Dunman on Google Maps and memory.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/ther...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social

A graphic reading: The Vesuvian Fallacy. Kevin C. Moore. Quote: It matters little whether or not the unraveled text of the Herculaneum scroll is legitimate: we cannot know. Contrasts issue 1. Portals.

Kevin C. Moore on truth, generative AI, and accessing the fragmentary past.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/the-...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social #STS

A graphic reading: landfill as portal. Emma Jahoda-Brown. Quote: What I loved about the landfill was my anger about the landfill. Contrasts issue 1, portals.

Emma Jahoda-Brown on landfill, odor, home: contrastsmag.net/article/land...

You can read more about Emma's work on the Chiquita Canyon landfill on the @castac.bsky.social blog: blog.castac.org/2025/09/odor...

via @contrastsmag.bsky.social

Contrasts An online magazine about the intersection of science, technology, and society.

Word of mouth is one of the best ways for new publications to get off the ground, so if you enjoyed a piece (or two or three), please share with your friends, via whatever online portal strikes your fancy.

Read about portals & more: contrastsmag.net

Screenshot of Contrasts website. Text, hovering over a blue-pink holographic background, reads: 01. Portals. Portals are passageways to and between worlds. From the fantastical to the mundane, portals mark the betwixt-and-between. A state of metamorphosis, a threshold ripe with risks and possibilities.

And...we're off! @contrastsmag.bsky.social is a new digital magazine focused on the intersections of science, technology, & society ( #STS, #HistSTM ).

Our first issue on "portals" considers passageways between worlds—from apprenticeships to AI, maps to migration.

Read the issue: contrastsmag.net

"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.