Erika Dreifus

Toward the end of each week, the My Machberet blog presents a collection of links, drawn primarily from the world of Jewish books and writing.

• Mazal tov to the four nonfiction authors whom the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature has announced as finalists for this year’s prize.
• Literary event recordings: I highly recommend Andrew Silow-Carroll’s Tuesday evening conversation with Israel-born, Calfornia-based writer Maya Arad. Although Arad is (very) well-known as a Hebrew-language writer, her first book of fiction in English translation (by Jessica Cohen) has just been released, and that’s what prompted this event, which I very much enjoyed. And on my “catch-up” radar: a recording of a Sunday discussion hosted by Agnon House and the Jewish Review of Books in which Neta Stahl and Jeffrey Saks discussed their contributions to a new JRB issue and the ways in which they deployed the “frame of Jewish literature in general and S.Y. Agnon’s writing in specific to craft a response to the traumas facing Israel these past number of months.”
• The latest Jewish Book Carnival has been posted, hosted for March by Gila Green.
• New-issue alerts! I spent some quality time last weekend with the latest issue of Lilith magazine. Standout pieces for me, for various reasons, include an essay by Ilana Kurshan, initially published in the first weeks following October 7; Rachel Hall’s review of Hilary Zaid’s latest novel (this week, by the way, Zaid was announced as the recipient of this year’s Publishing Triangle Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award); and fifth-grader Hana Wildman Halpern’s account of the death of her sister Orli (you may have caught their mother’s New York Times essay marking Orli’s first yarzheit a few days ago, too). Now, I’m turning to the latest issue of SAPIR, which is themed “Friends and Foes.” Among work I’ve read so far: Einat Wilf’s analysis of how “the Palestinian movement has hijacked the meaning of words” and Tom Gross writing about how “the BBC has been misleading, misreporting, and sometimes libeling Israel in ways that aren’t merely wrong and offensive but also dangerous to Jews in Israel and abroad.” (I need to start focusing on the issue’s “friends” focus!)
• Finally: In case you missed it, I published an exceptional (as in, off-schedule) edition of my Substack newsletter for writers last Sunday. Given a series of troubling lit-world events the previous week, I simply had to.

Reminder: If you haven’t checked it lately, you may want to peruse the “After October 7: Readings, Recordings, and More” document-in-progress. (Updates are frequent!) This is another appropriate week to mention anew the availability of some cautionary information (also in-progress), compiled under the title “Writers, Beware.”

Shabbat shalom.