Zackary Sholem Berger is a frequent contributor to the Forward and the Yiddish Forward. He lives in Baltimore.
Zackary Sholem Berger
By Zackary Sholem Berger
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Yiddish World A high-quality Soviet Yiddish literary magazine is being digitized
The online issues of "Sovetish Heymland" will be a great resource for scholars and ordinary readers of post-war Yiddish literature
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Culture Sacrifice through Heresy
Read this article in Yiddish Qorbanot: Offerings Poems by Alisha Kaplan SUNY Press, 2021 Many people believe that sacrificing for a greater good is a virtue. In the Jewish tradition, even martyrdom in the right context is called “the sanctification of God’s holy name.” But what should you do when holiness is weakened — by…
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Culture Here I Am in Texas, At the Gates of a Refugee Camp
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Long-time Forward readers know that I work as a primary care doctor, an academic internal medicine physician, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to my other responsibilities, I have been serving quite a different population of patients for the last year and a half….
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Yiddish World Amazon Is Dooming New Yiddish Publications. Can It Be Stopped?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In 2005, Internet giant Amazon swallowed up yet another smaller fish, the self-publishing company CreateSpace, which made it possible to market titles in dozens of languages. Last year, in a decision that you would be forgiven for missing, Amazon announced that CreateSpace was merging with another division:…
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Community My Daughter’s Eighth-Grade Class is in Israel — And I’m Conflicted
As I write these words, my 14-year-old daughter is in Israel with her eighth-grade day school class. I don’t know what to think about the trip. Are such trips a good idea for American Jews? Is it something I should welcome for my daughter? How much laundry will she bring back? I don’t have answers…
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Opinion Gun Control – Mandated by Health, Supported By Jewish sources
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On March 24th, together with my 14 year old daughter and 9 year old son, I will be spending Shabbat differently than we normally do, as participants in the March For Our Lives in Washington, DC. As a doctor, researcher, and a Jew, I believe gun control…
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Yiddish World Faith Leaders and Doctors Disrupt the Senate For the Sake of Health Insurance
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I stood, legs apart and face to the wall, in the Capitol Police Vehicle Maintenance Division. In other words, a garage. And I thought: I want to shake the hand of the person who invented plastic zip ties. They’re probably doing extremely well for themselves. But let’s…
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Culture The Gloom and Redemption of Yiddish Poet Yisroel Shtern
The poet Yisroel Shtern (1894-1942) was reluctant to publish his own work, once writing about the “over-proliferation of books on this planet.” Nonetheless, in a 1929 dictionary of Yiddish writers, Zalmen Reyzen called him “one of the most important young Yiddish poets in Poland today, though for a full appreciation of his poetry… we must…
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