It’s a long and tedious drive back from Las Vegas. Darkness has set and the red taillights wind ahead of the car like an unending ribbon twinkling in the night. Inside the car it is anything but quiet or boring. Shahane and Gayane are making a stream of phone calls, remotely trying to complete the layout of the upcoming issue of the college newspaper they co-founded, along with Arpine, four years ago while sophomores at UCLA. “Lets just do a newspaper and have all Armenians – not just UCLA Armenians – write to it and contribute to it and that’s how it started. Very randomly,” Gayane says of the original idea. At the time, she believed that students needed an outlet to express themselves in ways not available to them. “This way, students can write how they felt about our culture and how they felt about being in the Diaspora as students in a very free way without being judged for it.”
Armenian Weekly Perseveres After 75 Years
At a time when the ethnic press is teetering on the brink of change, the Armenian Weekly celebrates its 75th anniversary with a vision to the future. It has survived a monsoon of editorial exchanges, a transgression of readership, financial instability, unsettled attitudes, and now the electronic age.
Kurds and Armenians: Finding Common Cause
On September 2, 1938 an editorial appeared in the Hairenik Weekly condemning the Turkish government’s brutal crackdown of its Kurdish population in Dersim. The editorial drew the following link between the common struggle for freedom waged by both Armenians and Kurds: