between Pesach and Shavuos in the Greater Hungary spring of 1944 did Jews count the weeks in ghettos the days in cattle cars without food or toilets the hours, minutes, seconds churning past burgeoning fields of new grain until they reached their ultimate destination?
The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition Translated and annotated by Peter Cole Co-edited and with an afterword by Aminadav Dykman Yale University Press, 544 pages, $30 ‘There among the trees of God / … I’d enter the sacred shrine of the woods / … And as I sat at the edge…
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:…
German Nobel literature laureate Gunter Grass published a poem Wednesday in which he said that Israel’s nuclear program is a threat to world peace. In his poem, the 85-year-old author claims that Israel’s nuclear reactor – and not Iran’s – presents a threat to world peace. Grass’ poem calls for Germany to cease supplying Israel…
Adrienne Rich has died, and a voice who provided invaluable insight to the discourse on motherhood, on feminism, on Jewish identity and on sexual politics, has been stilled. Rich, who was 82, died Tuesday at her home in California. Described in her New York Times obituary, as “a poet of towering reputation and towering rage,”…
“Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on / the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. / downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, / talking, reading the Kaddish aloud..” So begins Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” a sprawling lament for his late mother, Naomi Ginsberg….
Broadway Baby By Alan Shapiro Algonquin Books, 272 Pages, $13.95 In his debut novel, “Broadway Baby,” Alan Shapiro, the author of nine volumes of poetry, gives the much-maligned 1950s-era Jewish Mother a chance to tell her story. It seems in the 50 years since the appearance of Philip Roth’s comic and overbearing archetype, the male…
Crossposted from Haaretz Yarona Caspi’s interest in poetry “is a meeting of souls,” says the singer and artist in a conversation about her fourth and latest album, “Mafia Shel Isha Ahat” (“One-Woman Mafia”). It is an album on which she manages to bring together her intense personality and her awareness of the pop audience through…
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