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…
Penguin Modern Classics has recently reissued “My Happy Days in Hell,” an autobiographical novel by Hungarian Jewish writer György Faludy, to mark the centenary of the author’s birth on September 22. First published in 1962, “My Happy Days in Hell” is an essential document of the 20th century by a writer whose stature is comparable…
Poet, singer-songwriter, revolutionary, publisher, street vendor, historian, mentor, sage, wise man and wise guy, forward-thinking artist, activist, intellectual, pacifist, anarchist, teacher, dreamer and dear friend Tuli Kupferberg has gone on to wherever one goes. Born Norman (or in Hebrew, Naphtali, hence his nickname), on September 28, 1923, Tuli passed away on Monday at New York…
As shvitzing New Yorkers are glued to the weather forecast, tracking the minute movements (and long-awaited departure) of the heat wave, Israeli poet Ronny Someck divines a different sort of a forecast for us in his poem “Sun Sonnet.” An Iraqi-born poet, Someck is a recipient of the Prime Minister Award and Yehuda Amichai Award,…
If you find yourself at an avant-garde jazz concert and poet Steve Dalachinsky is not in the audience, you probably have the wrong address. An unparalleled jazz aficionado, Dalachinsky has soaked in enough of the music to attempt the impossible: to create the same indescribable, musical feeling through words. But with distinct influences of Dada…
As far as Holocaust poetry goes, in general I stand with Adorno: it is barbaric. The subject’s too loaded, too heavy and too sacred to approach with crafted words. Yet, having picked up Walter Hess’s collection of poems, “Jew’s Harp,” I was swept away by the depth of its lyricism, gentleness, and sheer beauty. Hess…
To an American reader, accustomed to individualistic poetry of Walt Whitman or the confessional writings of Silvia Plath, the recently published collection of Israeli poet Rivka Miriam, “These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam” (Toby Press) may seem like a deliberate insult. Throughout the collection, there is a constant sense of removal — or, perhaps,…
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