Jewish Literary Links
Posts Tagged‘Literary Events’
Midweek Notes from a Practicing Writer
Three quick things.
1. Calendar update! I’m delighted to announce that along with authors Ellen Meeropol and Sandell Morse, I’ll be taking part in an online literary event (on Zoom, of course) on Sunday, May 31. Many thanks to our gracious host Julie Zuckerman, of Literary Modiin. Register here.
Finds for Writers
Most Fridays the Practicing Writing blog shares writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend. But it’s been an excruciating week for so many of us. And frankly, I’ve paid next-to-no attention to garden-variety news from the writing and publishing spheres.
On Wednesday, however, I received an email from Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based global nonprofit organization that I’ve admired for many years. The email introduced a “mini-lesson” titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region.”
The resource isn’t perfect. (What resource is?) But one of its segments impressed me as something that, though intended for educators and students, could be clarifying for writers as well, in our work and in the rest of our lives. It’s a section titled “Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
Jewish Literary Links
A quick prefatory note: Like many of you, I’ve been awash in Jewishly-focused online offerings lately. This week’s links reflect that current reality.
- One evening this week, I celebrated Ellen Meeropol’s newest novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, by joining in an online book party featuring some short readings. (I’d been looking forward to learning more about the book after reading an essay that Elli published in Lilith last fall.)
- Prompted by another evening’s online discussion, I’ve just finished reading The Drive by Yair Assulin (trans. Jessica Cohen; New Vessel Press, 2020). In the tradition of the short novel set within a brief time span—in this case, a drive to a psychiatric appointment and the visit that follows—we meet a young Israeli soldier who is seeking relief from the emotional suffering he’s experiencing in his post. I’m not certain that, by the end, the novel is quite as “anti-militarist” as the publisher argued in the event description, but that’s a more complicated topic than I can take on here. Interested readers will some helpful background provided in this Los Angeles Review of Books interview.
- I’d intended to follow the Forward‘s discussion of “(Jewish) Journalism in the (Coronavirus) Crisis” as it unfolded on Zoom, but shortly before it began, I learned that my friend Aimee Pozorski was virtually addressing a library gathering on Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America at the same time. So over to Aimee I went! I don’t believe that Aimee’s event was recorded, but the Forward‘s was, and I plan to catch it on YouTube sometime soon.
- Speaking of The Plot Against America—the HBO adaptation (and its accompanying podcast series) ended this week. I’m still catching up on a number of the related commentaries that are out there to absorb, but for the moment, I’ll point you to this one, by Gabe Friedman.
- This week also brought us Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). Mindful that we’re also still observing National Poetry Month, I’ll point you to an online poetry event, curated by Erika Meitner, that I “attended” Tuesday evening; to these poems by Edith Bruck (b. 1932), translated by Jeanne Bonner; and to one of the Holocaust-related poems in my own poetry collection, re-published this week by on the website of the Sami Rohr Prize.
Shabbat shalom.
Words of the Week
Please excuse the self-focus, but in case you missed it—you can catch my first full-fledged “online reading,” featuring work from Birthright: Poems, right here. (Recorded on April 5, 2020.)