I have a confession to make. I didn’t see the IJN‘s 100th Anniversary Magazine — which was published June 24 — until late November. I did get a digital copy of the cover (right), and the staff pages (to update staff member bios), but I hadn’t seen the magazine in entirety.
Like all the staff — and the community — I was swept up in the sheer excitement of celebrating 100 years of continuous publication. I wrote blog postings about our centenary and posted celebratory status updates on our Facebook page. I shared in the joy and achievement, even though I hadn’t laid eyes on the actual product.
Whether the US Postal Service or Swiss Post is to blame, I still don’t know. Carol Coen sent the magazine as soon as it was published, but it simply never arrived. My money says it never cleared customs, but I’ll probably never find out. As of today, nearly six months later, the magazine still hasn’t arrived in my mailbox.
It will probably come as no surprise then, that one of the highlights of my recent trip to Denver was being able to finally sit down with the magazine. And I couldn’t have picked a better fellow reader than my grandmother, Miriam Goldberg, publisher of the IJN. We spent a wonderful morning leafing through the pages, reading the lovely advertisements paying tribute to her, reminiscing about old timers, with my grandmother handily filling in the who’s whos and what’s whats.
As we whiled a few hours away, I realized that the 100th Anniversary Magazine is an exceptional medium for connecting the older generations to younger ones. A bit of an obvious realization, I know, but still, set aside a few hours and sit down with your parents, grandparents, children or grandchildren (depending where you are on the spectrum), crack open the 100th, and share with them Colorado’s rich Jewish history, from the philanthropists to the clergy to the colorful personalities. And at the same time, the 100th is also ideal for all the new families moving to Colorado, an opportunity to gain an overview of and insight into their adopted community.
It’s December, and our centenary year may be coming to a close, but for me, it’s just starting!
