Skyping with Adam Rovner

We are very lucky to have the territorialist trailblazer Adam Rovner as a consultant for our researches into Imaginary Jewish Homelands.  We talked over the best strategies for doing archival work in the I.N. Steinberg Archives at YIVO in New York.  We discussed how no one has yet written a biography of this polyglot in part because one would need mastery of Russian, Yiddish, German, English, and Dutch to do it right.  There are two hundred folders devoted to Steinberg's efforts in Australia alone and another fifty on the Saramacca plan in Suriname so we need to work efficiently.  Then there are the files that contain maps, photos, geographical surveys and data.  These materials will be vital given the extent to which our augmented reality project relies on visualization and geo-location.  Adam is not only an amazing tour guide through the archival and bibliographical materials but he also seems to know every key person (whether academic scholars, Jewish community members, or Steinberg descendants) with whom we need to connect when it comes to the topic of Jewish territorialism and imagined Jewish homelands in Suriname, Western Australia, and Tasmania.