Joel Schalit

Coming to a Conclusion

In 2008, I edited three books, an international news portal and a Jewish cultural periodical, led the design of a leftist publisher’s website, and completed the last two revisions of my own book, Israel vs. Utopia. It was an incredibly exhausting year. Nevertheless, I put to use every conceivable kind of editing skill, in every publishing context, that I’d ever acquired, and somehow, got it all done.

This past week, the website I designed finally launched, and I received physical copies of two of the three edited books in question: Martin Bull’s Banksy Locations and Tours, and Naoki Inose’s A Century of the Black Ships: Chronicles of War between Japan and America. Bull’s book is already out in the US. Black Ships is forthcoming in April. The third title, James Horrox’ A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, will be out in June.

It is enormously gratifying to see these long-term projects slowly being released. As tempted as I am to share it, yesterday I got a chance to look at a very advanced draft of my own book’s cover too. In preparation for my publisher’s catalogue, after five years of steady work on IvU, I was positively thrilled to have this labor of everything, for lack of a better term, moving to its design phase.

I’ve been absolutely fried these last two weeks, and have been doing very little personal blog writing, shy of entering a link here and there. There’s more news yet to come. In the meantime, check out my first entry for the Religion Dispatches blog. It was written on my friend Evan’s suggestion, and published Tuesday night.

Never Heard of Them

For those familiar with the history of American Jewish magazines, my former employer, Tikkun, was not the first periodical of its kind to break with community publishing conventions. Starting in the 1970s, there were numerous such attempts, of which, until the early 00s, Tikkun was the most visible.

One such upstart periodical was  New York’s New Jewish Times, which ceased publication in 1981, five years before the launch of Tikkun. Remembered by journalist Samuel G. Freedman in Friday’s New York Times, my present editorial abode, Zeek, gets the descendents’ high five, together with our friends at Heeb.

Somebody ought to shine a similar spotlight on the late Davka.

Always About the Present

I’m so glad I fell behind posting this review. It’s the perfect piece to be publishing right now, this week in particular. Shai Ginsburg, the house critic at Zeek, has just penned his thoughtful take on Dani Rosenberg’s  Homeland. Premiered this year for the first time in the US, this Yiddish-language film about Israel’s War of Independence is packed, to put it mildly, with contemporary relevance.

How I Spent My Year

Between the books, music and film, I’d be hard pressed to find any signs of demoralization in 2008. Quite the contrary, in fact. For further reference, check out my year end top ten published in Tuesday’s Zeek.

Eretz Manhattan

A piece of the Berlin Wall, midtown.

The Zeek editorial meetings which brought me to New York are now over. After a ten hour-long session that began with a tasty Indian lunch on 96th street and Amsterdam avenue, I’m free to enjoy my last two days here. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. On the agenda is lunch at a small hummus place around the corner, a stop at my favorite local record store, Other Music, and then a short walk up to 12th and Broadway to meet my family for dinner.

The nice thing about this trip is that it’s introduced me to a part of the city I overlooked as a child, when my father and I lived here in the early ’80s. After fifteen years in the suburbs, my brother sold his home, and bought a place on the border between Chinatown and Little Italy last summer. A beautiful, two bedroom apartment in a brand new, four story building, David’s pad looks out at three Italian restaurants, and is a stone’s throw away from the best Malaysian restaurant and tacqueria in the city. On nearly every nearby block, there’s a deli replete with cans of Lavazza espresso and freshly baked breads on display in the window.

Before going into yesterday’s meetings, I went to the new MOMA for the first time with my former Tikkun co-editor, Jo Ellen. Though we did not have too much time to spare, we saw a few photographs by Gerhard Richter, which were spectacular, as well as a small exhibit of Emigre magazine covers.  As magazine editors, this was perhaps the most interesting of everything we looked at. Design-wise the most influential periodical of the first wave of “desktop-publishing,” Emigre’s influence remains vast and under-appreciated. Thus, it was incredibly gratifying to see the periodical on display at an institution like the MOMA.

The only problem with this trip is how little time it has afforded Jennifer to relax. Hard at work at her company’s Manhattan office, she slaved away until eight last night, and then hung out here with my brother until I came in at eleven. Nevertheless, it was immensely cool to see how comfortable both she and David were with each other when I walked through the door. Their second time meeting each other (their first and last meeting to date was at our wedding party last year), the two of them seem to have found much in common with each other very quickly.

Because my family is so spread out – in Israel, France, New York and Maine – I’ve always lamented how difficult it’s been to facilitate this kind of intimacy. But, given  moments like this, its clear that we’re all learning how to overcome the geographies that separate us. Whereas in the past, I would go up to four years at a time without seeing my parents, over the course of the past sixteen months, Jennifer and I have been to Israel twice to see them, and they’ve returned the gesture with two visits to the US. Now, with David in the same loop, things could not be better.

Longtail Music Appreciation Moment: Can: Future Days (1973)