Erika Dreifus

• Opportunity alert: “Tablet is launching a new science section and we’re looking for writers! If you’re familiar with Tablet’s Jewish approach to the world and have experience covering science, tech, or health, email scroll(at)tabletmag(dot)com with story ideas and clips of your previously published work.”
• “The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world’s preeminent center for the study of the Yiddish language, culture and history, has laid off all of its librarians.” News broken by the Forward has caused shock and sadness this week and produced this statement from the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL).
• It has been a busy week for the AJL, bringing also the announcement of its latest Jewish Fiction Award (bestowed on Goldie Goldbloom for On Division; Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio has been named an honor book). Also, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, three AJL members—former chairs of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee Rachel Kamin, Chava Pinchuck and Heidi Rabinowitz—recommended a sampling of Holocaust-related middle-grade and young-adult books.
• “Both Abby Stein’s ‘Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman’ (Seal Press) and Mimi Lemay’s ‘What Will We Become: A Mother, A Son, and a Journey of Transformation’ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) are uncommon memoirs ‘about becoming’ (Stein) that involve monumental life-altering choices regarding religious and gender identification. Stein narrates her own life experience, from childhood to early adulthood, and Lemay weaves together her own story and that of her transgender young son.” Sandee Brawarsky covers both books for The New York Jewish Week.
• And some recommended listening: the latest episode of the Jewish History Matters podcast, in which Rachel Harris joins host Jason Lustig to discuss Harris’s recent volume Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict, “which brings together almost forty scholars who are teaching about Israeli and about the Arab-Israeli conflict in a range of institutions and settings to talk about how we teach about this conflict and why it matters.”

Shabbat shalom.