Alona Bach
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bachwards.bsky.social
Alona Bach
@bachwards.bsky.social
430 followers 200 following 62 posts
Archive haunter (where history of technology + Yiddish meet); theatre/-er-maker; rogue illustrator. PhD candidate in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, & Society (HASTS).

she/her | 📷: Der praktisher elektrotekhniker (1925)
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bachwards.bsky.social
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.
November 3, 2025 at 9:36 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
November 2, 2025 at 2:16 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
October 31, 2025 at 6:40 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
October 31, 2025 at 12:28 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
October 30, 2025 at 6:19 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
October 30, 2025 at 12:40 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
(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".
April 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
April 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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?
February 25, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
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
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.
February 25, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
February 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
February 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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.
February 2, 2025 at 10:10 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
#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.
February 2, 2025 at 3:28 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
"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.
January 22, 2025 at 7:48 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
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. Angular drawing of young, skinny man with large eyes, in profile from the waist up. He wears a cap, holds a book, and looks forward towards the right edge of the paper. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Tsalke. Illustration of man in profile, a portrait from the shoulders up. He has a dark cap, a pointed nose, and prominent adam's apple, and a small dark beard extending from his chin. The caption reads, in yidishe oysyes: Feter Itshe.
January 21, 2025 at 3:56 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Just three more days to send in your proposals for #Farbindungen25 "Bad Yiddish / בעד ייִדיש"!

More info & submit: www.farbindungen.com/2025

📷: Di varhayt (29 June 1915), p. 3.
Scan of an add for a room rental in a Yiddish newspaper, with many Englishisms ("a kitshen, leytest impruvments"). The headline reads "Bath Beach" in transliterated Yiddish: "Bed Bitsh"
November 12, 2024 at 11:26 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Announcing the #Farbindungen25 (@farbindungen.bsky.social) #Yiddish Studies Conference: BAD YIDDISH
Time to ask: "װי 'בעד' קען ייִדיש זײַן?"

CFP: bit.ly/Farbindungen...
Submit (by Nov 15): bit.ly/farbindungen25
Graphic flyer designed to look like casual handwriting on a piece of notebook paper with a sticky note. Bad Yiddish, Farbindungen 2025, February 2-3, virtual. Proposals due Nov 15. Logos for Farbindungen and the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Matching graphic designed to look like casual handwriting on a piece of notebook paper. A list of Yiddish phrases has been crossed out in red pen: shlekht yidish, beyz yidish, paskudne yidish, reyshiesdik yidish, yidish mit zibn grayzn, bad yiddish, shidiy deb. Bed yidish, which is the last item on the list, is not crossed out, but there is a question mark in red pen by it. Includes title and dates of conference at the bottom.
September 18, 2024 at 4:31 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
My brilliant HASTS cohort-mate!

(Full article: news.mit.edu/2024/mariel-...)
Screenshot of a professional portrait photo of a woman, with a caption underneath reading: HASTS student Mariel García-Montes researches the internet's impact on society, especially regarding privacy and young people. "I would love to be part of a generation thinking about what technology would look like if we put the public interest first," she says.
September 15, 2024 at 5:59 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
CFA: "Yiddish Technologies in Text and Context"

Join me & @sophielizbear.bsky.social at NeMLA in Philly, March 6-9, 2025, to talk about the intersections of #histtech and #Yiddish!

Abstract submissions due Sept 30. Panel description + submit: cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S...
Scan of page from Yiddish electrical textbook showing Yiddish text, formulas, and circuit diagrams.
July 23, 2024 at 8:56 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Ayelet Brinn & Miryem-Khaye Seigel launch #Farbindungen24 w/ a keynote ft. drag king Pepi Littman; the roles of women translators & secretaries in the history of the US Yiddish press; shtumer alef as queer. "Interrogate gender truisms!" & "Ask questions instead of nec. answering them."
Page of digital notes titled "Shtumer Alef," showing notes from talks by Ayelet Brinn and Miryem-Khaye Seigel, with sketch of drag king Pepi Littman in the middle in a bowler hat and suit.
February 18, 2024 at 3:47 PM