Erika Dreifus

There is a lot to unpack in this episode of People of the Pod, which features host Manya Brachear Pashman in conversation with poet (and psychiatrist) Owen Lewis. (The embedded video from YouTube does not seem to be showing up in the published version of this post—I have no idea why, because in preview mode, it is—so I’ll tell you that the episode is titled “War and Poetry: Owen Lewis On Being a Jewish Poet in a Time of Crisis.”)

Let me share a couple of thoughts:

• I’ve ordered Owen Lewis’s new book, and I am very much looking forward to reading it.
• Personally, I find it very difficult to overlook the “diatribes” embedded within the Palestinian poetry that Lewis cites with more praise than I can, and with more equanimity than I possess. That’s less because of the ideological bent of the poems themselves (there’s an ideological bent within some of my poems, too—a different one). Rather, it’s because of my very strong sense that the diatribes/ideology are, as the saying goes, “a feature, not a bug” within the larger literary community’s embrace of these poets and their works. Or, to paraphrase from Adam Serwer’s now famous formulation in another context: The ideology is the point.
• As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t (or can’t) object to this Palestinian poetry being platformed and amplified. But my issue—and it would seem from the conversation here that Lewis, too, believes this to be the case—is that different perspectives, from prevailing Jewish/Israeli views as expressed through poetry, are not being heard in the same spaces. At all.
• You can find another version of this podcast, with an easy-to-read transcript, on the AJC website. And you can find more from Owen Lewis in this quite recent installment from Judith Magazine.