Marc Yellin’s Gift: ABQJew.com
The ABQJew.com website remains online with updated SOURCES AND RESOURCES links to local, state and national Jewish sites: PRAY, ORGANIZE, EAT, and LEARN with its 3 million page views in 15 years. Archived now is the BLOG, and retired, the CALENDAR.
By Dianne R. Layden and Diane Joy Schmidt
For fifteen years, if you were Jewish in New Mexico and wondered where to pray, eat, or find the week’s Chanukah party, there was one place to look: ABQJew.com. The site became the go-to source people reached when searching for anything about Jewish New Mexico — reaching over 3 million page views in that time.
Now its creator, Marc Yellin, has retired the Abq Jew Calendar and, for the most part, the Abq Jew Blog. But the site itself — with its updated links to synagogues, organizations, kosher markets, and Jewish education across the state — remains live, a resource he’s leaving in place for the community that came to depend on it.
Marc Yellin was born in Brooklyn and raised in Valley Stream, Long Island. He spent 10 years in Livingston, New Jersey, just outside Manhattan, which had a strong Jewish community and where he was a technical writer. He and his wife Perri have been married 50 years. They have two children, a son and a daughter.
While in New Jersey, Marc discovered he had an old high school friend in Cedar Crest, NM. They exchanged visits, and Marc and Perri became enchanted with the Land of Enchantment. When he arrived, he saw a need for ABQJew.com as he found little information about Jewish activities on the New Mexico Jewish Federation website. Marc started his own website and coordinated with the Federation where they posted the link to it on their website.
The ABQJew.com website remains up as a valuable resource for the community. It maintains updated links to all the synagogues in the state - PRAY; to local, state and national Jewish organizations - ORGANIZE; to local markets for kosher food and Jewish eateries - EAT; and extensive links to Jewish education classes and schools, LEARN.
The site retains the complete archive of the valuable, historic, and popular BLOG, which gained national attention, including a New York Times mention, when it received hate mail from a notorious source.
Marc has now retired from maintaining the Abq Jew Calendar. Marc collected information from synagogues, the Jewish Community Center, the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society, the New Mexico Holocaust and Intolerance Museum, the Santa Fe Distinguished Lecture Series, and classes at Oasis, among many other sources. A post went out weekly to inform people of upcoming events. While Yellin modestly only counts those who subscribed to the post as 500, the actual reach of the site as a whole, including the calendar, was enormous.
AbqJew.com soon became the number one site people reached looking for information about Jewish New Mexico.
The Federation recognized the value inherent in this work. And the site’s importance became most evident after the Federation folded — an event Marc announced to the community in a particularly poignant blog post, “Train Wreck at Federation.”
Abq Jew then became the only glue connecting New Mexico’s Jewish community, including the nonaffiliated, especially during Covid. Meanwhile, the last issues of the New Mexico Jewish Link, the 55-year-old print Federation paper, limped along until August 2022.
The online, independent New Mexico Jewish Journal launched in March 2024 with "The New Mexico Jewish Journal is now live! Vol. 1 No. 1." Now in its third year, NMJJ has earned over 70 national, regional, and state awards. Events are highlighted in its biweekly newsletter and in a carousel of Community Supporter and single-event ads at the top of the website. NMJJ covers news, arts, culture, and spirituality for New Mexico's diverse Jewish communities.
NMJew.org is a new, automated, block-style calendar using CalendarWiz technology; it lists events, submitted only by invited organizations, on the dates they occur. It went online in 2026, intended to replace the Abq Jew Calendar, and was designed by a volunteer working group under the direction of the Jewish Community Foundation of New Mexico and with the intent that it would require minimal ongoing curation.
The Abq Jew Calendar
Marc Yellin did a good deed for New Mexico. The calendar compiled cultural events, classes, and workshops at various venues that Jewish residents otherwise might not know of. Also, people sent Marc material - it was not limited to established affiliations. His calendar of events reached subscribed readers on a weekly basis – but that was not counting the thousands, many unaffiliated, who weekly depended on the open website to find out what was upcoming on the calendar, and where to eat, pray, learn, and read the Blog.
For example, the December 8, 2025 message listed seven upcoming activities – a lecture by Rabbi Jack Schlacter, two concerts by the Klezmatics, a presentation about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, films at the Santa Fe Jewish Film Festival, a program about Yemeni Jews, and the Butterfly Project at the JCC – as well as four Chanukah celebrations; the cover of the current issue of the New Mexico Jewish Journal, which lists its contents; and participating authors and their books at the 2025-2026 JCC Bookfest.
The Blog “Known locally as New Mexico’s very own peripatetic historian, philosopher, scholar and mensch,” Marc was lauded nationally.
Marc also provided frequent blogs on a variety of topics. Below is a selection from Marc’s satirical blog on March 6, 2014: “West Bank Settlements to be Removed”:
Massive Withdrawal Planned: In a move that he claims has no political motivation, Mayor Richard J. Berry today announced that all Albuquerque settlements on the West Bank of the Rio Grande will be dismantled and removed . . .
When it was pointed out that these were housing developments, not settlements, the mayor said "I don't care why they moved there. They bought a house, they settled down. They're settlements."
The mayor's new directive will apply to "Paradise Hills, Taylor Ranch, and whatever they call that area around Coors and Sequoia," said the mayor. He stressed that the withdrawal applies only to Bernalillo County, where he has jurisdiction. "Rio Ranchers are on their own."
Nobody knows how far Bernalillo County stretches to the west, but the Weck's Restaurant at the end of Universe has vowed to remain open no matter what.
The I-40 corridor, for what it's worth, is also exempt from the withdrawal decision. "It's the only way to get to California," noted the mayor. "And refugees from Arizona need a way to flee that oppressive regime. It's the humanitarian thing to do, keeping I-40 open."
Hate Mail to ABQJew.com: In January 2017, ABQJew.com received in its contact form two threatening messages with anti-Semitic slurs. Filled with insults, the messages threatened kidnapping, rape, torture, and death. Warning: The selections below contain offensive language.
Message 1: “The only good Jew is a dead one . . . You f------ Zionist kikes will pay the ultimate price if you try to escalate war and use the US as your golem, you have been warned.”
Message 2: “I know where each and every one of you kikes live . . . [Y]ahweh abandoned the Jews in 70 AD because you are a disgusting race of criminal parasites and satanists who deserve to be exterminated. God Bless Hitler . . .”
The sender’s name in the contact form was William Pierce, who – according to the Southern Poverty Law Center -- was “America’s most important neo-Nazi for some three decades until his death in 2002” and the movement’s “fiercest anti-Semitic ideologue.” Pierce is the author of the famous race war novel The Turner Diaries. Called the “bible of the racist right,” the book was a “key inspiration” for Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce was founder and leader of the National Alliance, which included “terrorists, bank robbers and would-be bombers.”
Marc notified rabbis, synagogues, Jewish organizations, and Mikey Weinstein, whose Military Religious Freedom Foundation addresses Christian Nationalism in the military. The Anti-Defamation League reported the messages to the FBI and Albuquerque Police Department. The New York Times wrote about the threats in its “This Week in Hate” series. In a blog, Marc declared, “This blatant, open anti-Semitism must not be allowed to become the new normal.” He called for others who receive threats to make them public if safe to do so: “Nothing is going to change if people don’t know.”
Marc and Perri are still enchanted with New Mexico, but they have returned to the East Coast to be close to their children and grandchildren. In March 2026, he stopped publishing the calendar of activities, but his blogs are fully available at https://www.abqjew.net/.
For Marc, developing and managing Abq Jew was a satisfying personal and professional experience. He greatly appreciates the organizations and individuals who supported him.
References
North, Anna. “Hateful Threats Against a Jewish Blogger,” The New York Times, February 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/opinion/hateful-threats-against-a-jewish-blogger.html.
“William Pierce,” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., https://www.splcenter.org/resources/ extremist-files/william-pierce/#:~text=William%20Pierce%2C%20America's%20most%20 important,bank%20robbers%20and%20would%2Dbe%20bombers.
See also post about ABQJew.com site: https://www.nmjewishjournal.com/abqjew-and-all-new-mexico/
Dianne R. Layden, Ph.D. is a semi-retired professor and writer in Albuquerque. Her field is American Studies. She published a booklet in 2024 about historic Temple Montefiore in Las Vegas, NM, which is available on the New Mexico Jewish Historical website, NMJHS.org. Dr. Layden won a national award for her 2017 article in Legacy, the NMJHS newsletter, about New Mexico Holocaust survivors. She also won an award in the 2026 NM Press Women Communications Contest for her NMJJ review, Tribute to Frances Levine’s New Book, Crossings: Women on the Santa Fe Trail
Diane Joy Schmidt is the founding publisher and editor of the New Mexico Jewish Journal.
A short version of this story first appeared in Legacy, the quarterly publication of the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society, Summer 2026. Vol. 41.
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