// from the editors //
Fall 2016
From the Editors
When we, the editors of The Current, select pieces for each issue, our focus is on finding writing that simply makes an impact. Whether that be through challenging our assumptions, instructing us of something new, rendering us wholly uncomfortable, or just making us laugh at our human condition. Avoiding a fixed theme in our curation of the publication, we often approach this Editor’s Note with a hazy direction: should we discuss some tenuous threads we find between pieces or perhaps the lack thereof? This issue, however, our authors must have collaborated behind our backs to determine a theme. (Maybe in a magnanimous effort to make writing this Note an easy process.) Because if we could give this issue a one word title, it would be, without hesitation, “discovery.”
While some may say every piece of writing is a discovery, our authors evince a particularly rapacious desire to uncover mysteries and tell untold stories. Starting in spring 2016, we rediscovered a section entitled “Boroughing”—an article type in which we send a writer out to a place that has been forgotten or overlooked in another borough of the City—in our archives and brought it back into our program. For this issue, Aaron Fisher ventured to City Island, a little-known sliver of land in the Long Island Sound, and discovered a New England fishing town inside of New York City. This obvious example of discovery has seeped into other areas of our publication.
Take Ruthie Gottesman’s creative nonfiction piece, "On Trembling Fingers and Trembling Feet"—a record of her never-told family history that traces the transmission of Judaism and religious change in her family from her illustrious Hasidic ancestor, the Baal Shem Tov, to her grandfather and her father to her. Tova Kamioner unearths the story of Cafe Naná, a Kosher dining establishment in the Kraft Center, through interviews with the café’s founders. While many students enjoy in the campus eatery’s offerings, they might not be familiar with its origin story, a combination of a student-run project, Israeli advocacy, and the addition of a cultural profile to the University. Rebecca Jedwab went to the Museum at Eldridge Street to review the synagogue-cum-museum, but instead found herself reorienting her very definition of the museum. Art history student Esther Moerdler claims the meme as a new genre of art through mining the history of art and locating the development of meme-like artistic production. Leeza Hirt is motivated to unveil the mysteries shrouding the controversial, yet seldom-discussed, Confucius Institute housed in Kent Hall. Though her probing was met with institutional resistance, her work evidences a desire to reveal and report.
In the spirit of discovery, we leave you with this brief note so that you may uncover what lies within.
While some may say every piece of writing is a discovery, our authors evince a particularly rapacious desire to uncover mysteries and tell untold stories. Starting in spring 2016, we rediscovered a section entitled “Boroughing”—an article type in which we send a writer out to a place that has been forgotten or overlooked in another borough of the City—in our archives and brought it back into our program. For this issue, Aaron Fisher ventured to City Island, a little-known sliver of land in the Long Island Sound, and discovered a New England fishing town inside of New York City. This obvious example of discovery has seeped into other areas of our publication.
Take Ruthie Gottesman’s creative nonfiction piece, "On Trembling Fingers and Trembling Feet"—a record of her never-told family history that traces the transmission of Judaism and religious change in her family from her illustrious Hasidic ancestor, the Baal Shem Tov, to her grandfather and her father to her. Tova Kamioner unearths the story of Cafe Naná, a Kosher dining establishment in the Kraft Center, through interviews with the café’s founders. While many students enjoy in the campus eatery’s offerings, they might not be familiar with its origin story, a combination of a student-run project, Israeli advocacy, and the addition of a cultural profile to the University. Rebecca Jedwab went to the Museum at Eldridge Street to review the synagogue-cum-museum, but instead found herself reorienting her very definition of the museum. Art history student Esther Moerdler claims the meme as a new genre of art through mining the history of art and locating the development of meme-like artistic production. Leeza Hirt is motivated to unveil the mysteries shrouding the controversial, yet seldom-discussed, Confucius Institute housed in Kent Hall. Though her probing was met with institutional resistance, her work evidences a desire to reveal and report.
In the spirit of discovery, we leave you with this brief note so that you may uncover what lies within.
Cover art by Ariel Bershadskaya, BC '17.