Lena Dunham Connected To Judaism Through Israeli Poet Yehuda Amichai
(JTA) — Jewish actress, writer and director Lena Dunham announced to her 3.2 million followers on Instagram that she has connected to Judaism through the poetry of modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
In a post on erev Yom Kippur, Dunham wrote: “This past year a special person helped me connect to my Judaism in a new way, beyond bagels and sample sales and crushing guilt.”
She said that after the death of her grandmother she “suddenly felt a desire to understand what the religion that meant so much to her had to offer her granddaughter, even if my world view is far less cleanly structured than hers.”
“While I’ve learned a lot, I haven’t started going to temple. I haven’t married a lawyer. But I have fallen in love with the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and I am sorry to anyone I wronged this year (except for some people on Twitter.)
She included the image of two pages in a book with the Amichai poem “People Use Each Other” in English and in Hebrew.
The post received nearly 29,000 likes and comments ranging from Shanah Tova, to expressions of love for the actress, to recommendations of other poets.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO