Yiddish Writers
H. Leivick I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… Sholem Aleichem…
Category: Jewish Tradition
Poets/2
I Am by Laura Aranda I am on my way I am haven’t yet arrived and the in the in-between I am that bliss you find in a mountain rainstorm in a solitary blade of…
Remembering Shammai
Shabes morning I fix a period for reading My three “rabbis” recently deceased— Harold Bloom, whose extended family on both sides perished in Europe Every boy but one in George Steiner’s lycée lived after the…
An Alphabetical List
The following is an alphabetical list of topics and/or possible chapter titles for a book I was working on in 2011. At this stage, it was autobiographical. It eventually morphed and became the novel, Dear…
The Reading Life/1
The Chasm between Them and Us Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s JournalTranslated by Anita Norich The accomplished Yiddish writer Molodovsky wrote this novel in serialized form in 1940-41, knowing obviously…
A Youth
The Daily Mailby Hedy Epstein In those first years of the Nazi regime, it was hard for me to grasp the import of politics writ large. However, I would soon come face to face…
“Our Exposed Nerve”
October 12, 2002 This book is crucial to my work. Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist and child of Holocaust survivors trying to report accurately what has been transpiring in Gaza since the famous handshake….
Ahavat Israel: Wiesel’s Hasids, Dreamers, and Sages
Elie Wiesel, Sages & Dreamers: Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Portraits and Legends Summit Books, 1991 This work concludes Wiesel’s collections of portraits and legends of the figures from the Judaic tradition who have helped him…
The Imperative To Remember
Anyone who does not actively, constantly engage in remembering and in making others remember is an accomplice of the enemy. Conversely, whoever opposes the enemy must take the side of his victims and communicate…
Women in Black by Hedy Epstein
Every second Tuesday of the month, we hold a vigil of Women in Black in University City. Usually, these are uneventful. People may support us, some take our flyers and say thank you, others refuse…