Erika Dreifus

Our friends at the Jewish Book Council recently nominated us for a Beautiful Blogger Award (thank you, again!). To claim this prize, we need to share seven little-known facts about My Machberet…and pass the award on to seven other bloggers.

So here are some things you may not know about My Machberet and the blogger behind it.

1. The Hebrew name of My Machberet’s author is Yocheved. I am named for my maternal grandmother’s mother (“Yettie”), who was born in Galicia in 1891 and died in Brooklyn in 1931.

2. One of my earliest and favorite childhood reads was a beat-up, falling-apart storybook that was kept at the home of my paternal grandparents (I think it was my dad’s when he was a child–our copy, which I now possess, is from the second printing in 1948). Its title: Habibi and Yow: A Little Boy and His Dog. It is through this book that I first learned about many Jewish holidays, blessings, and traditions. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice reading it to me….

3. I’ve attended Hebrew School/religious instruction in Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform settings.

4. Since the summer of 1978, I have been a proud Reform Jew.

5. The first published writing to earn me a paycheck was a poem that appeared in Young Judaean magazine (I was 15 when I wrote it).

6. I resigned from the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) in 2006 when the then-president of the organization refused to stop using the NBCC blog as a bully pulpit for his own anti-Israel preachings (and harassed me personally when I objected to the practice). Now that he has moved on to other projects, I occasionally consider rejoining. But the experience left me with a lot of bad feelings.

7. My soon-to-be-unveiled new website will feature a resource section tailored to Jewish writing/writers.

And now, please allow me to introduce another seven “beautiful bloggers”:

The Arty Semite
The Boston Bibliophile
Brave New Words
Jeffrey Goldberg (if you’re a regular reader of My Machberet, you knew that that one was coming!)
Jew Wishes
Jewish Muse
What Would Phoebe Do

I hope that you find all of these blogs as interesting, informative, and inspiring as I do!