Erika Dreifus

• This week, I discovered the short fiction of Israeli writer Omer Friedlander. And it’s really something. Check out “Jellyfish in Gaza,” a prize-winning short story in Baltimore Review (h/t Julie Zuckerman for the referral), and be sure also to read “Operation Tamar,” a story set in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, which another friend pointed me to.
• This week also brought the latest mid-month Jewish Book Carnival, a project of the Association of Jewish Libraries, hosted for June by Gila Green. The July Carnival, by the way, will be hosted right here on My Machberet; if you’re someone who routinely writes/podcasts on Jewish books—as a librarian, blogger, book reviewer, and so forth—please check the guidelines and send a recent link from your blog/publication for potential inclusion. (Note: This is NOT a forum for publicists/authors to send links promoting individual products, even of the literary sort.)
• Speaking of the Association of Jewish Libraries: Its first digital conference is slated to begin in little over a week. And as I mentioned in my midweek post on the Practicing Writing blog, I’ll be there! There’s still time to register if you’re interested in doing so.
• “Lore Segal’s Her First American (1985) follows a young Austrian refugee named Ilka who falls in love with a powerfully charming and prominent Black intellectual in 1950s America.” And this is the book that has been selected for the next edition of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) online book club (which will convene on July 14th). Suffice to say that the title is now on my tbr list.
• And last, but, especially on this Juneteenth, absolutely not least: “Many of us know about the role of Jews in the civil rights movement. We think of the Freedom Riders Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who, together with James Cheney, were shot and later buried on a lonely levee in Mississippi. Or we recall the iconic photo of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm-in-arm with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of us are less familiar, however, with representations of black struggle in the pages of Yiddish literature.” Selections in the Yiddish Book Center’s latest “Weekly Reader” can help us learn.

Shabbat shalom.