JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Subscribe to support their on-the-ground reporting here. Neighbors are pushing for a Northwest Side park to be renamed after an influential German-Jewish author and poet who died in the Holocaust. Kolmar Park, 4143 N. Kolmar Ave., is named for the street on which it…
An “Al Cheyt” for White Jews in 5781 It’s been a long year (The lunar one) And we’ve got atoning to do We could beat our chests But we are buying books And adding Facebook photo frames (I’m telling on myself here) So, it’s time to ground our feet and dig in deep to the…
Philip Levine, the Jewish poet who died on February 14 at age 87, was a feisty writer inspired by working class roots and a family tradition of bubbe-meises (grandmother’s fables). In “Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections” (2000) Levine analysed his poem “The Old Testament”: “My twin brother swears that at age thirteen I’d…
Poet laureate Philip Levine died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday morning at the age of 87. Dan Friedman, writing for the Forward on August 9, 2011, characterized the poet as a working-class Jewish hero of words: Levine was one of the oldest poets laureate and his work was certainly the most humble in tone from…
Argentinian Jewish poet Juan Gelman, a critic and activist against the country’s military governments of 1976 to 1983, has died. Gelman died Tuesday in Mexico City where he lived in exile. Gelman, born to a Jewish family of Ukrainian immigrants who moved to Buenos Aires to the Jewish neighborhood of Villa Crespo, was exiled to…
A statue of Hungarian Jewish poet Miklos Radnoti, who was killed by Hungarian Nazis at the end of 1944, was broken in two parts after being struck by a car. The Radnoti statue in the village of Abda, in western Hungary, was either hit on purpose or by a drunken driver on Sunday, a police…
The American Jewish poet John Hollander died on August 17 at age 83. At a 1990s New York literary gathering, I praised his translation of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Golem.”. Hollander demurred modestly, not adding as he did to the poet Edwin Honig in 1985: “My mother’s family traditionally believes that my…
In a storage area of Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, there is a striking portrait known to only a few art lovers. It’s the work of Joseph Solman (1909–2008), the Vitebsk-born American Jewish artist whose studio was located for decades over the former site of New York City’s 2nd Avenue Deli. Painted in…
