Jake Marmer
By Jake Marmer
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Life The Poetics of Early Fatherhood
More diligent and disciplined parents, tracing the first months of their kids’ lives, fill out pretty diaries, recording the minute progress, saving bibs, pasting photographs — in short, getting started on the great family blackmail file. We’ve made a few feeble attempts in that direction, too, but the efforts weren’t exactly sustained. Our son’s first…
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The Schmooze Talia Lavin’s Poems for Passover
The irony of Pesach lies in the juxtaposition of the formative freedom narrative with the fraught mythic lore that goes along with its celebration. Today on The Arty Semite we’re featuring two poems by Talia Lavin that address this very juxtaposition through the lens of the contemporary Israel. The first poem tackles the subject head-on:…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Deeper Than Nostalgia
Jamie Saft is far from the only musician who questions and complicates notions of cultural, musical and ethnic identity. That’s bread and butter for many of the artists featured on the Tzadik label, which has now put out six of Saft’s albums, including his latest, “Borscht Belt Studies.” Neither, on this release, does Saft clash,…
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The Schmooze Laurie Patton’s Poetry and Hermeneutics
Across the centuries, Jewish hermeneutists — interpreters of the holy texts — have had radically different agendas: illuminating and whitewashing, edifying and indoctrinating. A poetic impulse, if not outright poetry, was occasionally part of the picture, too. And how could it not? Dealing with poetic texts of our national and religious mythos, imaginative responses only…
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The Schmooze Poetry on Demand
On Tuesday, Jake Marmer wrote about poems as a noisy Mediterranean duplex. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: Reputedly, Rachmaninoff once said: “There’s no such thing as inspiration….
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The Schmooze Poem as a Noisy Mediterranean Duplex
Jake Marmer is the author of “Jazz Talmud.” His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: About a decade ago I read a Billy Collins poem called “Advice to Writers,”…
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The Schmooze Poetics of Holiday Aftermath
One of the most compelling themes, and even triggers, in contemporary Jewish poetic discourse is the question of otherness — our own otherness. There’s no better time to contemplate this idea than during the winter holidays, when cultural differences come into stark relief and questions of identity resurface, as do millennia-old grudges and dilemmas. Ivan…
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Books Forward Fives: 2011 in Poetry
In this, the third annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of the most important poetry books of 2011. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. 2011 has…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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Culture They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
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Culture ‘A Complete Unknown’ proves that one thing about Bob Dylan will certainly endure
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Film & TV Why ‘The Brutalist’ resonated so deeply with me
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Theater While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
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