Rachel Kadish’s most recent novel, “The Weight of Ink,” received the National Jewish Book Award and the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Fiction Award. She lives outside of Boston and teaches in Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Rachel Kadish
By Rachel Kadish
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Culture I Was Hesitant To Write About The Holocaust — Until Toni Morrison Lit The Path
Editor’s note: This essay, originally published on August 8, 2019, was republished for the first anniversary of Toni Morrison’s death on August 5, 2020. Toni Morrison leaned forward in her chair, watching my face as she spoke. It was clear, she said, that I had a story to tell. “But this —” here she pointed…
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Culture Why Artists Must Be Our First Responders in Trump’s America
To speak publicly in the immediate aftermath of a shock is dicey. What seems clear today may prove otherwise next week. What’s certain, though, is that violence has been done to our country’s aspiration toward tolerance; to our tradition of disagreement grounded in fact; to our collective sense of safety, already far too fragile for…
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Culture What Elie Wiesel Taught Me About Being a Writer
It was only a few weeks into my first semester of graduate school that things began to go awry. The M.A. Creative Writing workshop that autumn was led by a writer I admired; my fellow students were savvy and talented, energetic in their critiques of each other’s manuscripts. I’d just returned from a stint working…
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News Literary Bomb Shelter in Tel Aviv
On my first day of teaching at Bar Ilan University, during a tour of the palm-tree-lined campus near Tel Aviv, the program administrator informed me apologetically that I’d been assigned a basement classroom in a building some distance from the English department. I wasn’t concerned — over the years I’ve taught in basement classrooms, in…
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Culture At Ease
The decision to send the three of us kids to the Solomon Schechter School was, I’m told, a difficult one. My mother, who is a daughter of Holocaust refugees and a staunch Zionist, pushed for us to attend. My father, who came from a more typical American Jewish background, worried that we’d emerge from such…
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