Erika Dreifus

• “Raisins and Almonds and Shavuot”: terrific piece by Rokhl Kafrissen that taught me a lot about the classic lullaby. (And a reminder that you can also listen to this beautiful song on the playlist that I created for my poetry collection, Birthright.)
• Speaking of poetry collections: You’ve still got time to enter this giveaway for a chance to win a copy of Wolf Lamb Bomb, the full-length debut by my friend Aviya Kushner. (The book received a wonderful review from Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent just last week.)
• The latest Jewish Book Carnival went live a few days ago, hosted for May (and yes, it is the May carnival) by Ann Koffsky.
• Always nice to find a review by Diane Cole. In this case, I’m talking about her Hadassah magazine piece on The New Jewish Canon: Ideas & Debates 1980-2015 edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin (Academic Studies Press) and The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century by Adam Kirsch (W.W. Norton).
• Happening next week: the 2021 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, during which Julia Watts Belser, associate professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University, “will use classic rabbinic Jewish texts to grapple with pressing contemporary questions about climate change and environmental justice, inviting us to tangle with grief, confront vulnerability, and re-imagine possibilities for survival.” Free registration.

May it be a Shabbat shalom.