Letter from the Editors — One Year
By Evan Mateen and Sophie Levy
This week marks one year since ZAMAN’s launch in February 2019. In that time, we have published forty articles, essays, poems, paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and other projects that have given a contemporary voice to Mizrahi stories. We have made friends in the most unexpected places and have planted the seeds for a community of contributors, readers, and collaborators that reaches far beyond our hometown of Los Angeles.
From the first few weeks of publication, we were surprised by the strong response we received in support of this project; to see that so many other people, who came from such distinct communities, also shared our yearning for a platform dedicated to Mizrahi culture and affairs only made us more excited to make ZAMAN an ongoing initiative. This has been a year of thinking hard about the places we come from and the places we haven’t gotten to see. It has been a year of commemorating our families’ stories and valuing the histories that brought us where we are today. It has been a year of questions asked and boundaries pushed, controversies addressed and beauties appreciated.
When we first conceived of ZAMAN, our goal wasn’t to simply create an archive of Mizrahi history and leave it at that. It’s common for cultural work to deal with the past as a static entity, emphasizing preservation more than re-engagement or re-evaluation. For us, the past is something that is constantly in dialogue with the future, informing and shaping it, regardless of how aware we are of that fact. ZAMAN was and is about bringing this dialogue to the fore, making it accessible to people who may not have been familiar with it in a Mizrahi context in the first place, and all the while sustaining a commitment to relevant, excellent creative work along the way. The work of our contributors has made this vision a more gratifying and beautiful reality than we could have imagined.
There are a lot of people we’d like to thank for their tremendous support and contributions to ZAMAN over the course of the past year. Thank you Lauren Neman for serving as our Communications Manager and helping our presence flourish on and offline. Thank you to our recurring contributors and good friends, Kyle Newman, Jamie Aftalion, Kayla Cohen, Gabi Kamran, Gabie Yacobi, Jane Paknia, and Mirushe Zylali for staying committed to ZAMAN even as full-time students. Thank you to all of our one-time contributors for giving us the honor of publishing your work and giving us glimpses into new media and communities other than our own. We are deeply grateful to Chaya Community, Protocols, the JFREJ Mizrahi Caucus, New Voices, Gharib Magazine, and the Current for involving us in collaborations and cross-publishings that have helped our content reach new audiences. Special thanks to Tom Haviv and Ruben Shimonov for being some of our biggest advocates in New York, and to our families and friends in Los Angeles for rallying behind us in constant, unconditional support.
Lastly, we’d like to thank our readers. Whether you’ve browsed our site once or twice, have sent it around to your relatives, or have told us what our content means to you, we are endlessly grateful for your engagement, and this is all for you. We hope you have gained something from ZAMAN, be it new questions, new answers, a feeling of resonance, a new perspective, or a new understanding of Mizrahi culture and life. We’re looking forward to the year ahead and can’t wait to see how we’ll grow and what we’ll learn.
All the best,
Evan and Sophie
Photo: Evan’s grandmother Minoo (left) and her younger sister, Sophie’s grandmother Homa (right) holding a puppy. Tehran, 1954.
