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Application Alert: Great Jewish Books Summer Program

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

logo-headerAn announcement from the Yiddish Book Center:

Great Jewish Books Summer Program

A week-long exploration of literature & culture for high school students
at the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA

August 3-10, 2014

The Great Jewish Books Summer Program brings together a select group of rising high school juniors and seniors to read, discuss, argue about, and fall in love with some of the most powerful and enduring works of modern Jewish literature. Participants study with respected literary scholars, meet prominent contemporary authors, and connect with other teens from across the country. One of last year’s participants writes: “I had an amazing time every single day and would go to bed feeling excited for the next day.” And a parent adds: “Our daughter’s experience was off-the-charts wonderful!” So tell the young person you know and love to apply now for summer 2014! (And note: Every admitted participant receives a scholarship for the full cost of tuition, room, board, books, and special events.)

Applications are due March 15, 2014. For more information go to http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/ or email greatjewishbooks@bikher.org.

 

Sunday Sentence

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Another Sunday in which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks others to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

“As Proust knew, all love depends not just on current infatuation but on retrospective jealousy; lacking a classy old lover, a Marquis de Norpois, to be jealous of, I was jealous of the men in Montreal health-food stories who had sold her millet and lecithin granules.”

Source: Adam Gopnik, “Bread and Women,” in The New Yorker (subscription required)

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Kristallnacht in Poetry & Prose

by Erika Dreifus on
4
The shattered stained glass windows of the Zerrennerstrasse synagogue after its destruction on Kristallnacht. Pforzheim, Germany, ca. November 10, 1938. (USHMM/Stadtarchiv Pforzheim)
The shattered stained glass windows of the Zerrennerstrasse synagogue after its destruction on Kristallnacht. Pforzheim, Germany, ca. November 10, 1938. (USHMM/Stadtarchiv Pforzheim)

“Kristallnacht, literally, “Night of Crystal,” is often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass.” The name refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938, throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops.”

“Kristallnacht figures as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews.”

Both of my paternal grandparents had arrived safely in the United States before the Kristallnacht of November 1938. And yet, among the stories my grandmother told over the years, the tale of how her parents and other loved ones back in Germany experienced the horrific events lodged in my mind and in my heart. (more…)