Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Rodger Kamenetz introduces “Third Temple,” by Richard Chess. This piece originally appeared on January 5, 2001, as part of the Forward’s Psalm 151 series. It is being published here online for the first time. Richard Chess is a…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite will be featuring excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer writes about Maya Pindyck, whose collection “Friend Among Stones” was published last year by New Rivers Press. To some, Tel Aviv is a party town with sandy beaches. To others, it is a vortex…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. Before immigrating to Israel, I worked for over 25 years at a Vilna newspaper called Czerwony Sztandar, or The Red Flag, which was not only the sole original Polish-language newspaper in Vilna, but also in the entire Soviet Union. Looking back through…
Crossposted from Haaretz A collection of every single book and poem by Dahlia Ravikovitch, who passed away five years ago, will soon be released. The comprehensive project, edited by Giddon Ticotsky and Uzi Shavit and published by Kibbutz Hameuchad, also includes previously unpublished poems found in the artist’s estate. Ido Kalir, Ravikovitch’s son, made her…
If Yiddish songs were popular in your childhood home, then the recently released new edition of “Pearls of Yiddish Poetry” may help put forgotten pieces of your auditory past back together. Many of us remember fragments of songs that we heard as children, songs that come back to us while doing the laundry, or scrubbing…
What if I knew more Hebrew than Spanish? What if I only hung out with white girls? What if Orthodox Jews reject me because I have a busted hymen and a head full of human rights? What if I’m not really Jewish? Those were some of the questions Vanessa Hidary, aka the Hebrew Mamita, asked…
There is a plastic rooster and a frog to the left, and the hind legs of two brown horses to the right. It’s a spooky old merry-go-round, set against a yellow backdrop, and crowned with an appropriately morose title: “Sitting Shiva For Myself.” Welcome to Renee Blitz’s latest poetry collection (Regent Press), the underrated gem…
די העלדן אין דער זאַמלונג זענען אוקראַיִנער ייִדן וואָס לײַדן פֿון אַ שווער לעבן אָבער בלײַבן פֿאָרט לײַטיש.
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