"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...
Posts by Alona Bach
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!
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
What do the āFather of the Bundā & 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.
NEW Pedagogy piece: Scientific Literature in the Yiddish Classroom
If you use this material in your classroom--let us know! š¦
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.
šæ 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 Wiringāstringing 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 eruvāits components, its vulnerabilitiesābut also how it coheres community.
šæ 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.
šæ 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.
šæ 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
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 worldsāfrom apprenticeships to AI, maps to migration.
Read the issue: contrastsmag.net
"Incomplete mourning, being unable to fully talk about what was lost, means that youāre perpetually haunted."
ā @rokhl.bsky.social on ghosts, IRB forms, Purim shpiels, perfume, and her new play Shtumer Shabes.
Raboysay (/robotsay š¤)!
One more week to send us your Yiddish sci-fi submissions. We're especially keen for pitches for the blog and pedagogy sections ā on incorporating Yiddish sci-fi into the classroom, interviews, reviews, blog-length thoughts on techno-messianism or dys/utopia, and more!
#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 freeāaf 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)
āDer 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."
āDer groyser kundes (March 31, 1911), p. 11.
We publish:
+ long-form pieces (~3ā4k words/equivalent, flexible genre);
+ āBroadcaSTSā (<300 words);
+ āFrom the Sourceā (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 portalāand 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 ābeforeā 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 & genresānarrative 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 kunĀdes 1, no. 20 (SepĀtemĀber 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 miniyaturnāoriginal 100-250Ö¾word Yiddish mini-sci-fi narratives)āon the themes below, and beyond!
What other social and technological futures have we imagined, feared, hoped forāaf 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
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This sounds like a wonderful project ā 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!