In March we had some great conversations and maybe just a kleyn bisele of Purim fun. It seems that you, our readers, enjoyed these things as well: this month we reached 2,000 “likes” on our Facebook page and 700 subscribers to this newsletter. We appreciate your readership and we’ll keep working to bring the highest quality writing on all aspects of Yiddish to this ever-growing community.
So what drew the crowds? Read on to see what’s new at In geveb this month, and visit ingeveb.org where new content is added every week.
A reminder: abstracts are due on April 1st for our special issue on “Religious Thought in Yiddish,” guest edited by Ariel Evan Mayse, Naomi Seidman, Marc Caplan, and Daniel Reiser. We look forward to reading your submissions!
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Did you ever notice how almost every news article about Yiddish talks about the death of the language, the rebirth of the language, the rising from the dead of the language, and how many brains get eaten by Yiddish every year? Yea, so did we. So In geveb’s founding editor Saul Noam Zaritt decided to explore the phenomenon of “zombie Yiddish” in the only journalistic form appropriate for such a topic: the listicle.
There are two great interviews new on the blog this month: our editor Diana Clarke spoke with Max Sparber about activist editing on Wikipedia, bringing the concept of “diaspora nationalism” to the crowd-sourced encyclopedia. And in what we hope will be the first of many joint ventures, In geveb partnered with the journal East European Jewish Affairs to publish an interview with author and former Forverts editor Boris Sandler, in English and in the Yiddish original.
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And if you missed the winter run of the New Yiddish Rep’s production of Sholem Asch’s (in)famous play God of Vengeance . . . well, then you’ve also missed the spring run by now. But! You can read about it in this review by di shvester Fester, Clare and Kate, which is the next best thing.