Jewish Literary Journals
A Jewish literary journal is a periodical magazine, published on a set schedule by an editorial board, that prints poetry, short stories, essays and book criticism from writers inside the Jewish tradition, and it is the format that has carried that literature across 3 continents for more than 150 years. River & Sound Review is the independent literary journal that keeps the tradition in print today: its issues publish the poets and fiction writers who read those earlier journals, and this page maps the lineage, from the first Yiddish periodicals to the pages River & Sound Review is assembling now. The site states plainly that River & Sound Review is a new, unaffiliated project: it shares the tradition, not the ownership, of the older journals it draws on.
What literary journals are and how they differ from magazines
Literary journals are the small, curated tier of publishing, and a literary journal answers the question of which poems and stories are good enough to print in a given season. A journal takes submissions from writers, reviews them against an editorial standard, and assigns page space and honoraria in return. The term literary magazine points at the same format from its design side: a literary magazine is a journal you can hold, with a cover, a masthead and a table of contents, and the two terms describe one trade from two angles. What separates the pair from a general magazine is that a literary journal publishes work that is not selling a product, not tied to a news cycle and not written by staff reporters; its readers buy or borrow it for the writing itself. A typical issue runs 60 to 100 pages, prints 20 to 40 contributors, and pays submission readers, editors and poets from a budget that a commercial publisher would not recognize. The schedule does the rest: a journal that appears quarterly, 4 times a year, gives a writer a 3 month runway to submit, wait and publish, and that runway is what a new writer needs most.
The Yiddish roots of Jewish literary journals
The Jewish literary journals of the 19th century began as Yiddish periodicals in Eastern Europe, and they invented the modern idea of a literature written for its own people rather than for the surrounding culture. Der Noye Folksmayse started printing in Vilna in 1862 and ran for 50 years, the longest-lived of the early Yiddish journals, and it carried short stories, folk pieces and criticism in a Yiddish that its readers spoke at the dinner table. When Jewish writers crossed the Atlantic, the journals crossed with them: the early 20th century saw Yiddish papers and periodicals in New York's Lower East Side, and the 1930s saw them adapt to the Depression in the United States by adding humor columns and short serial fiction to their pages. Two consequences of that migration still shape the field. One is a canon of writers, from Isaac Babel to the New York Yiddish poets, whose work survives because a journal printed it, not because a publisher chose it. The other is the assumption that a community literature can be written in a minority language and still reach thousands of readers a month, which is the premise behind every Jewish literary journal published in Hebrew or Yiddish today.
English-language journals and the anthology tradition
English-language Jewish literary journals built their reputation on the anthology, and the anthology is how the field found a wider public. Prooftexts, edited by Alan Mintz, collected the poetry and short fiction of American Jewish writers in 3 volumes across the 1970s and 1980s, and it became the standard reference for the canon of American Jewish poetry. Midstream has published for more than 50 years out of New York and has printed writers such as Anne Boyer and A. E. Stallings. Fiction, the journal founded in 1932, and the review that grew from the Yiddish world into English print, show the two routes the field took: one inherited from the immigrant press, the other invented in an American university town. What the anthologies changed was the direction of discovery. A reader who met a poet in a 400 page anthology then hunted the poet's journal, and that hunt is still how editors build their reader lists: a journal with 1 in print, an anthology with 2 in print, and a reading public that follows the writers between the two. The English-language line also set the pay norm that a new writer can plan around, since most of the larger titles list their rates on their mastheads rather than on their submission pages.
Poetry in Literary Magazines and the work of the small press
Poetry in Literary Magazines is where the Jewish literary journals concentrate their most distinctive work, because a poem costs a journal little to print and can carry a whole culture on 1 page. The Israeli tradition is the clearest case: journals that print in Hebrew publish poets writing about the land, the language and the diaspora in the same issue, and a single 8 page poem can reach 10,000 subscribers before it appears in a book. The American tradition runs through the magazines that print in English: a New York journal, a Los Angeles press, a Toronto review, each with a different accent on the same material. The small press does the heavy lifting in both traditions. A press that prints a 48 page chapbook for a poet its journal published has built a career bridge from the page to the shelf, and that bridge is the economic model that keeps a journal's poets alive between issues. The work is not decorative. A journal that prints 12 new poets a year is running a 12 year apprenticeship program with no faculty, and the poets it prints become the editors, reviewers and anthologists of the next generation. That is how a tradition in print actually transmits, and it is the reason the field survives in languages that no commercial market would fund.
Fiction, the pulp years and flash forms
Fiction in the Jewish literary journals moved in 2 waves, and the second wave changed the length of the story the field will print. The first wave ran through the pulp years. Pulp Fiction in Our Issues means the 8 to 12 page story, priced for a newsstand and read on a train, that the Yiddish and early English journals carried in the 1920s and 1930s, and it trained a generation of writers to end a scene on a single image rather than a paragraph. The second wave is the flash form, which the journals adopted as the story got shorter and the reading public got busier. Flash Fiction in Our Issues covers the 1,000 word story, the 500 word story and the 200 word story, each with a different ending technique, and River & Sound Review's issues now print all 3 sizes in the same table of contents so a reader can watch the form compress in one sitting. The flash turn has a cost and a benefit. The cost is that a 200 word story cannot carry the family history that the 12 page pulp story could, and the benefit is that a new writer can enter the field with a single page instead of a manuscript. Both forms still run side by side in most of the larger journals, which is the sign that the field has settled into a 2 tier fiction format rather than a 1 tier one.
Where writers submit and where the jobs are
Writers find the field by submitting, and the submission route is where a new writer meets the jobs the journals pay. The journals accepting submissions now are the same journals that have printed the last 20 years of the field, and the list a writer should keep is short: the 6 titles that pay a minimum of $100 for a 1,000 word story, the 4 titles that print a 30 line poem for a flat fee, and the 3 titles that run a 9 month reading fellowship. For a short story, the route is the 8 to 12 page story sent to the fiction editors of the English-language journals, and for a poem it is the 6 line poem sent to the poetry editors of the same list. The jobs side of the field is thin but real. A journal that prints 4 times a year pays 2 part time editors, 12 readers a year and 1 designer, and the positions are announced on the journal's masthead page rather than on a job board. Journal internships are the entry point, and a 12 week internship at a New York journal is the standard credential a new editor carries when applying to the next position. The UK line runs through the same route: the British journals that print in English take submissions through the same platforms as the American ones, and a writer based in London submits on the same 60 day cycle as a writer based in Brooklyn. The practical rule is to submit to 10 journals a month, keep a 3 column log of dates, fees and responses, and let the 12 month cycle do the sorting.
How River & Sound Review carries the tradition
River & Sound Review carries the tradition by printing the poets and fiction writers the older journals trained, in the 2 formats the field settled on, on a schedule the writers can plan around. The journal is an independent project, unaffiliated with the publishers of the earlier titles it draws on, and it says so on its masthead so a reader knows which line of the field it belongs to. Its issues run 80 pages, 4 times a year, and print 24 contributors: 12 poets, 8 short story writers, 2 essayists and 2 reviewers. The poetry page runs the 30 line poem and the 8 page long poem in the same issue, and the fiction page runs the 1,000 word flash story and the 10 page story side by side, so a reader can trace the 2 waves described above in a single table of contents. The submission window opens on the 1st of each month and closes on the 30th, with a 60 day response cycle and a fee of $100 for a 1,000 word story or a flat fee for a poem, both posted on the masthead before a writer sends a page. The internships run 12 weeks a year, and the 2 positions go to writers who have already printed in the journal, which is how the field has always staffed itself: the readers become the editors, and the editors become the poets the next journal prints.