Shtume Shprakh (Mute Language) (originally in sonnet form) I looked around — and saw that half of my years are fading on the dirt road; that over my life, there closes, from my burial shroud, the first pale fold. So I doubled up like a swallow, that no longer finds her nest under the roof….
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in…
Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein) was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1896 to a religious family. In 1914, he immigrated to the United States under the pretense of enrolling in law school but almost immediately dropped out and became involved with the burgeoning Yiddish poetry scene in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he would…
It may turn out to be one of the strangest political revivals on record — a comeback without the protagonist having gone anywhere. In the hours and days after the Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas hammered out a unity agreement for governing the West Bank and Gaza in late April, media reports presented Palestinian Prime…
For City University of New York trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the furor over his recent push to deny playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree because of his views on Israel is just the latest in a career full of high-profile public brawls. The son of two Holocaust survivors, Wiesenfeld, 52, grew up on East Tremont Avenue…
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to Congress on May 24, he will be appearing in front of some of his greatest fans in the United States. But his remarks will be addressing the Obama administration, a much more critical constituency. It’s a dual audience whose diverse stances toward him are likely to impact…
Their gold and silver medals glinting in the late morning sun, David Rosenberg, Victor Levinson and Mikhail Rabkin stood among a small group of men on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach Avenue, dressed in their finest clothes. On that day, May 9, across the former Soviet Union their comrades-in-arms were being feted as heroes in grandiose Victory…
When federal prosecutors charged New York State Senator Carl Kruger with taking more than $1 million in bribes in March, few were surprised to see seven others indicted with him. The colorful Kruger, who represents the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay, has long attracted media attention for high-profile deal-making…
The last in a line of historic garment unions has selected a new president, following the resignation of longtime union leader Bruce Raynor, amid charges of financial impropriety. Workers United, which is a 100,000-member affiliate of the massive Service Employees International Union, elected Noel Beasley as its president on May 9. Beasley is director of…
Gratitude is a strange, multi-meaning-ed thing. It’s both a constant and nonexistent. Just before Passover this year, I bought a new Haggadah from a graphic designer and ketubah maker named Tsilli Pines. I clicked “purchase” after reading just one passage, a meditation on dayenu. “A mother asks, ‘Just let this baby be born healthy and…
New York State’s highest court has agreed to hear arguments in a case aimed at shedding light on the failed prosecution of alleged Orthodox child molester Avrohom Mondrowitz. Mondrowitz fled to Israel following his 1984 indictment on multiple counts of sexual abuse. Alleging that the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office had bowed to pressure from the…
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