Jake Marmer
By Jake Marmer
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The Schmooze Summer Poetry From Ronny Someck
Last year, as the scorching summer set in, we offered our readers unexpected relief from the heat. Admittedly, it was more of an aesthetic, even darkly comic relief, rather than a physical one. It was Israeli poet Ronny Someck’s piece, “Sun Sonnet.” This year we’re featuring another summer poem of Someck’s, “Rainmakers’ Vacation,” which, like…
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The Schmooze Dog-Eared Poetry: Three Works by Erica Baum
Poetry is everywhere, especially in places you would least expect it to be. Even the most mundane texts — be it a news article or street advertising — have poetry within them. Such is the sentiment conveyed by writers involved with the “found poetry” genre, most famously explored by Williams Carlos Williams in his epic,…
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The Schmooze Poetic Resources of Jewish Folklore: Three Works by Howard Schwartz
In a recent article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia,” Michael Weingrad argued that dark, Gothic fantasy writing does not sit well with the Jewish weltanschauung, and that by and large, we simply do not have that kind of literature. This is because, as Weingrad compellingly puts it,…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Daniel Kahn and the Relevance of Yiddish Protest Songs
Courtesy of Daniel Kahn We all know people who seem to have been born in the wrong decade — or even in the wrong century. Only very few of them, however, attempting to connect their society with that of another world, stretch across eras, and become giants — artists and thinkers like Sun Ra, Walter…
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The Schmooze Getting Out of the Roman Bath: Poetry by Susan Comninos
This week we’re pleased to feature a poem by Susan Comninos, “Rome Visits When I’m in the Bath.” The poem is a bit of a maze. On the surface there’s the juxtaposition of Jewish and Christian identities, but then more layers begin to emerge. Do the two identities refer to different modes of inspiration, to…
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The Schmooze Hillula: Poetry for Lag B’Omer
Marking the 33rd day since the beginning of Passover (this year on May 22), Lag B’Omer is a less of a holiday than a mystical occasion to party. In Meron, right outside of the northern Israeli city of Safed, an annual gigantic celebration called Hillula takes place. Safed is famous for the medieval kabbalists who…
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The Schmooze Jerome Rothenberg: Khurbn and Poetry as Language of the Dead
To last week’s “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Holocaust” published here in the Forward, another significant contribution can be added: Jerome Rothenberg’s “Triptych,” which assembles three serial poems — “Poland/1931,” “Khurbn” and “The Burning Babe.” Today on The Arty Semite, we’re featuring an excerpt from the middle section. As Rothenberg poignantly points out in the…
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The Schmooze National Poetry Month: Shabbat and Palm-Sized Watermelons
We’re at the end of the National Poetry Month celebration at the Forward. Aside from the flurry of posts on The Arty Semite, we’ve also featured an interview with seven poets. One of the interviewees, Maya Pindyck, who has already made an appearance on the blog last year, is here again, with two poems,”Shabbat” and…
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