Contact Micah Books:
Phone: 781-631-7601
Snail Mail:
Micah Publications, Inc.
255 Humphrey Street
Marblehead, MA 01945
"The emotions an animal mother has for its young is the same as that of a human mother for its young." Maimonides. (Photo courtesy of PETA)
JAR (Jews for Animal Rights) was founded in 1985. Our slogan:
“Judaism and Vegetarianism go together naturally.”
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Micah Publications is run by Bob and Roberta Kalechofsky. The books we write and the books we publish are our communication with the world, up front and personal.
Occasionally a friend asks why our books are so serious. I like the explanation Hawthorne gave when he was once asked the same question. “It’s true. In real life I am a bon vivant, but everytime I sit down to write, the devil jumps into my inkwell.”
To my surprise, the last thirty years of our life have been spent in movements. A tide swept us along and then swept Micah Publications and our books, which were in response to pressures we felt in the world and the ideas we felt compelled to communicate.
Micah Publications started in 1978 and was part of the Small Press Movement, later called the Indepdendent Publishers’ Movement, which had developed out of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960’s. The roots of independent publishing are long and honorable. They include Tom Paine, William Blake, Robert Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Virgina Woolf, Anais Nin, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Carl Sandburg, and the grandaddy of them all, Walt Whitman. That’s a partial list of the past hundred years or so. But the prestige of commercial publishing in the 20th century had overwhelmed the public, and self-published writers or writers whose work had come through a small independent press could scarcely get reviewed, sold or picked up by a distributor. A movement developed to try to remedy this problem. Valiant people spent hours planning small press festivals in tents, in gymnasiums, in schoolyards and little by little, small press publishers inched their way into public consciousness, though the business of publishing was expensive and time-consuming for writers and artists who had to do everything from setting type, to illustrating the books, to writing copy, and to loading up cars with books to distribute them.
Then came the digital revolution in printing and a writer could go from computer to printing press, bypassing a dozen in-between steps, even the expense of warehousing books. Self publishing and independent publishing are now respectable.
Then, also came the Animal Rights Movement. In 1983, Richard Schwartz sent Micah Publications a copy of his self-published book, Judaism and Vegetarianism. We were not vegetarians at the time, but we were after reading the book, which we went on to publish.
This connected us with the Food Revoution, health care problems, the organic food movement and, ultimately with the green movement and problems of global warming. A pebble cast into a lake widened into ripples around the world.
DONATIONS TO JAR: A contribution of money is always appreciated, but we prefer that you be proactive. The best donation is to buy our books as gifts---for yourself, for your libraries, for friends, distribute our literature, become a speaker at an organization or library, join the green food movement. Push the books and the literature. We know the value of a hand-to-hand effort.
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