iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Other translations of Yiddish women playwrights in this series address related themes of gender, power, mental illness, and more: Lerner's DI AGUNE (Zisl Piazza): www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-lit... Arciszewska's MIRYEML (@sgollance.bsky.social): www.yiddishbookcenter.org/discover/yid...

In addition to this translation project (CRACKED and other plays), Jane Rose’s Yiddish work lives on today in performances by GLYK (glykkolektiv.com) and scholarship by Rebecca Turner (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw2K...).

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congressforjewishculture.org

Jane (Jennie) Rose (née Zuckerman, c. 1875–1927) was a Cleveland-based cultural activist, Yiddish and English playwright, and fervent socialist. Read more about her life and work here: congressforjewishculture.org/people/826/R...

Rose, Jane — Congress for Jewish Culture

JANE ROSE (ca. 1880-July 14, 1927) She was a playwright, born in Minsk with the maiden name of Tsukerman. She came from a poor family and arrived in New York in 1896. She was a socialist and active ...

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

In spring 1917, playwright Jane Rose published the first installment of a Yiddish play offering a portrait of working-class family life & a critique of early-20th-century sexual mores. An excerpt of my translation of CRACKED is now up: www.yiddishbookcenter.org/discover/yid...

Screenshot of the website linked in post. The header image for the page is an old Yiddish-English flyer about birth control.

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Huzzah!!! This looks fantastic (and such a fun punctuated title!). Can't wait to read it!

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

"In order for Yiddish to thrive, every Yiddish student must be a teacher, and every Yiddish teacher must be a student." Andy Roshal on peer-to-peer communicative language instruction & variationist, dialect-rich pedagogy. ingeveb.org/pedagogy/pee...

ingeveb.org

Peer-to-Peer Pedagogy: Reflections from a College Campus | In geveb

For there to be a Yiddish-speaking community at Oberlin, someone needed to teach the community Yiddish. It seemed that that someone, despite my inexperience and

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

This sounds like such a wonderful class (and the students are very lucky to have you)!! So glad to hear that you're getting to watch them think, create, write as well. Would love to be a fly on the wall and see it all unfold!

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

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...

kirkusreviews.com

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.

Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference @farbindungen.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Reposted by Alona Bach

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

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

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.

blog.cjh.org

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

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

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: 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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

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: 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.

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Kelsi Dunman on Google Maps and memory. 💿 contrastsmag.net/article/ther... 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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Kevin C. Moore on truth, generative AI, and accessing the fragmentary past. 💿 contrastsmag.net/article/the-... via @contrastsmag.bsky.social #STS

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

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

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

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

contrastsmag.net

Contrasts

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

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

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

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

"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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

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!

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Reposted by Alona Bach

Haim Gottschalk @hgot.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

#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

posenlibrary.com

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

(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.

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".

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

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.

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

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.

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?

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

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

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.

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

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!

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.

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

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...

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Reposted by Alona Bach

Ceryl @politicdormouse.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

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

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

מוראדיק הײַנטצײַטיק מיטן טראָפּ אויף מוראדיק

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

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

Sarah Biskowitz @sarahbiskowitz.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Reposted by Alona Bach

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

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

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

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

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

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

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

Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

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...

Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference @farbindungen.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Reposted by Alona Bach

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!

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

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

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.

Sonia Gollance @sgollance.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Reposted by Alona Bach

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

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.

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.

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Reposted by Alona Bach

Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference @farbindungen.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

#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...

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.

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Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

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