Notes & News
NOTES & NEWS Orim Dies We cannot let a good Jewish journal die without at least a lament at its passing. Orim, a Jewish Journal at Yale, breathed its last with the June (Spring 1988) issue. And it...
...Orim covered the world of Jewish belles lettres in a way no other magazine did...
...Lisa Fittko's account of "The Last Days of Walter Benjamin," a major German Jewish literary critic and essayist in the 1920s and 1930s who escaped to Spain via the French underground...
...And it is too bad...
...Although the Yale Jewish community is allowing Orim to die, Gubitz noted ruefully, it has recently raised $7 million for the new Yale Judaic Studies Program...
...All that remained of the old student publication was the subtitle, "A Jewish Journal at Yale...
...Gubitz also has another possibility for continuing publication, unrelated to Yale, which he is unwilling to discuss at the present time...
...Its circulation had never exceeded 1,500, but Onm made an important contribution to Jewish cultural life...
...Who knows, Orim may not be dead yet...
...In addition to financial support from individuals in Yale's Jewish community, Orim existed on funding from Yale's Hillel...
...The cause of death was the usual one in the case of Jewish magazines—not enough money...
...For further information, write to Professor Louis H. Feldman, Annenberg Research Institute, 420 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19106...
...At the end Orim had a circulation of only about 800...
...Last spring, Gubitz decided that with two kids in college, he could no longer afford to serve without pay...
...The program is intended primarily for those who teach at the undergraduate level, but others (such as independent scholars) may also apply...
...After two issues and then a year's hiatus in publication, Ponet decided to professionalize the magazine and brought in an experienced editor, Myron B. Gubitz, who produced an elegant "small" magazine under a new title, Orim...
...This Orim, however, would probably be a far more academic publication...
...For Gubitz, it was "the only journal that seriously reflected the state of Jewish cultural life—in scholarship and in creative endeavor...
...Feldman to Give Seminar on Judaism and Hellenism Twelve college teachers will have the opportunity to attend a summer seminar, The Greek Encounter with Judaism in the Hellenistic Period," to be given at Yeshiva University by Professor Louis H. Feldman, a renowned authority on Hellenistic Judaism...
...Yale University Press is considering making it into an annual that would reflect the spirit and output of Yale's Judaic Studies Program...
...Orim did not die of old age...
...Will Gubitz miss it...
...At the same time, Yale's Hillel decided it could no longer support a magazine that had very little relationship to it...
...Editor Gubitz worked for nothing...
...It will attempt to isolate those elements that are distinctively Greek and distinctively Jewish in both content and style during this period, and to see how major works—including the Septuagint the Apocrypha, the Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the works of Josephus—accommodate, synthesize or reject those Greek and Jewish elements...
...While Orim is dead for now, it might be resurrected in a new incarnation...
...In its three years of life, Orim published not only such famous names as Cynthia Ozick (who wrote a short personal memoir for the journal), Chaim Potok (who contributed a short story called ' 'Ghosts"), and the late Arthur A. Cohen (an essay published posthumously), but also talented young and lesser-known literary figures, poets, and essayists...
...it was only three years old...
...an essay by Richard Fein, the translator and companion of Yiddish writer Jacob Glatsh-teyn, ruminating about the task of translation and the translator's relationship to the Yiddish language...
...Gubitz recalls some of his favorite pieces—a short story called "A Gift House" by Judith Liebmann, about changing neighborhoods in contemporary New York and how an elderly Jewish grandmother bridges the gap between ethnic groups...
...Orim traces its origins to a student magazine called A Jewish Journal at Yale, published by Yale's Hillel under the direction of Rabbi James Ponet...
...There has never been a self-sustaining Jewish magazine...
...To work closely with writers, poets, and scholars, to help them shape their material, was a very gratifying experience...
...It fed my soul," he said...
...I enjoyed it enormously...
...This seminar, the fifth to be conducted by Feldman under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will evaluate the cultural and religious contacts between Greeks and Jews...
...a kooky poem by Rodger Kamenetz called "The All New Adventures of Superman" in which a young Jew takes on Superman...
...Orim would have to cease publication...
...The writing was on the wall...
...The seminar will be held from June 12 to August 4,1989, and each participant will receive a stipend of $3,500...
Vol. 13 • December 1988 • No. 9
