Jake Marmer
By Jake Marmer
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The Schmooze Ronny Someck’s ‘Sun Sonnet’
As shvitzing New Yorkers are glued to the weather forecast, tracking the minute movements (and long-awaited departure) of the heat wave, Israeli poet Ronny Someck divines a different sort of a forecast for us in his poem “Sun Sonnet.” An Iraqi-born poet, Someck is a recipient of the Prime Minister Award and Yehuda Amichai Award,…
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The Schmooze Two Poems By Steve Dalachinsky
If you find yourself at an avant-garde jazz concert and poet Steve Dalachinsky is not in the audience, you probably have the wrong address. An unparalleled jazz aficionado, Dalachinsky has soaked in enough of the music to attempt the impossible: to create the same indescribable, musical feeling through words. But with distinct influences of Dada…
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Culture Troubadors of Post-Modernity
Poetry didn’t always reside in the neatly formatted volumes that line our bookshelves. Before the age of Gutenberg — let alone Kindle — poetry existed mainly as performance, spoken or sung by traveling bards, epic balladeers and troubadours. It was a living, communal experience vastly different from the solitary reading that informs our encounter with…
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The Schmooze Walter Hess, Poet of Survival
As far as Holocaust poetry goes, in general I stand with Adorno: it is barbaric. The subject’s too loaded, too heavy and too sacred to approach with crafted words. Yet, having picked up Walter Hess’s collection of poems, “Jew’s Harp,” I was swept away by the depth of its lyricism, gentleness, and sheer beauty. Hess…
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Life ‘Give Her a Get’: Punk Band’s Message on Agunot
Punk movement’s Jewish roots are hardly a secret and have long been explored. But a punk band that creates music videos to promote the importance of freeing agunot — women tied to unwanted marriages because their estranged husbands refuse to give them a get, or a religious divorce — is something new. An under-the-radar band…
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The Schmooze Rabbi Greg Wall on the BBC
The BBC doesn’t interview American rabbis all that often, let alone mention them in a completely spiritual, non-political context. But their recent special on Rabbi Greg Wall pleasantly defies expectations. Wall is a jazz and klezmer virtuoso who was recently ordained as a rabbi and appointed to lead the Sixth Street Synagogue in New York,…
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The Schmooze April, the Poetry Month: Some Highlights
“April,” famously wrote T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” “is the cruellest month.” Despite this underwhelming endorsement, the Academy of American Poets inaugurated April as the National Poetry Month back in 1996 and, every year since, has hyped up a surge of readings, publications and all other things poetry-related. In the Jewish world, the initiative…
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The Schmooze Rivka Miriam: Silence as Midrash
To an American reader, accustomed to individualistic poetry of Walt Whitman or the confessional writings of Silvia Plath, the recently published collection of Israeli poet Rivka Miriam, “These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam” (Toby Press) may seem like a deliberate insult. Throughout the collection, there is a constant sense of removal — or, perhaps,…
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