Words of the Week

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“That cartoon was irresponsible and has great potential to ultimately do far more damage to Israel and [to the] Jewish people in general than it does to the policies Netanyahu or Likud.”
–Derek Kwait, “Collapsing Towers: Liveblogging My Quarrel with Haaretz” (New Voices)

“It is tough to say what is the most stomach-turning aspect of this. Is it that Hamas managed to bully and intimidate foreign journalists en masse for almost two months and get away with it? Is it the fact that this bullying and intimidation successfully prevented the world from receiving an objective picture of what this awful war was really all about? Or is it the fact that the principal correspondent of the New York Times either had no clue about what was happening, or instinctively desired to deny it, or both?”
–Jeff Robbins, “A Willful Ignorance on Israel” (The Times of Israel) (more…)

Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • Part-time job for a PJ Library Coordinator in St. Paul, Minnesota.
  • I’ll admit that I have resisted reading all the terrible details of the sickening Rabbi Freundel story. But I’m glad that I read Matthue Roth’s essay-post on the subject for Hevria.
  • A gorgeous–and haunting–meditation from Richard Chess on the “Good Letters” blog.
  • A review of Meyer Levin’s literary thriller Compulsion–from October 1956.
  • On my weekend listening agenda: the latest “Israel Story” podcast. (It’s book-themed.)

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Stunning Sentences Drawn from JLit

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Diary-of-the-Fall_06-242x390Every Sunday, I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.” Typically, I post the selected sentence on my Practicing Writing blog and share it on Twitter.

    Now, a lot of my reading falls what within might be called “Jewish literature,” so maybe it isn’t all that surprising that more than just a few of my Sunday Sentences also come from the world of JLit. This week, for instance, I posted a line from Diary of the Fall, a novel by Michel Laub translated by Margaret Jull Costa:

    My grandfather lost a brother in Auschwitz, and another brother in Auschwitz, and a third brother in Auschwitz, and his father and his mother in Auschwitz, and his girlfriend of the time in Auschwitz, and at least one cousin and one aunt in Auschwitz, and who knows how many friends in Auschwitz, how many neighbors, how many work colleagues, how many people he would have been quite close to had he not been the only one to survive and set off on a boat for Brazil and spend the rest of his life without ever mentioning any of their names.

    Other weeks, I’ve shared sentences from work by Stuart Rojstaczer. By Roz Chast. By Gary Shteyngart. And so many more. Take a look. And if you’re on Twitter and just learning about the hashtag here, please join in and share your own #SundaySentence selections in the future.

    Words of the Week

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    “But what has become even more stunningly clear in recent years is that even if the United States could fix the Palestinian issue and produce a two-state solution, that accomplishment alone would not stabilize the angry, broken, and dysfunctional Middle East. The region is already in the process of melting down for a tsunami of reasons that have nothing to do with the Palestinians. But talking about the consequences of not fixing the Palestinian issue, particularly in Chicken Little the “sky is falling” terms, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been wont to do, doesn’t help matters — it makes them worse.”
    –Aaron David Miller, “It’s Not Washington’s Fault” (Foreign Policy)

    “You can take for granted the way a grandfather feels for a granddaughter that has just been murdered,” he said. “You can see it.”
    –Shimshon Halperin, grandfather to Chaya Zissel Braun, quoted broadly, including by JTA.

    “The Met has the First Amendment right to present this opera, and people certainly have a similar right to attend. It is their choice.
    Equally, all of us have as strong a First Amendment right to make our position clear and warn people that this work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law.”

    –Rudy Giuliani, “Why I Protested ‘The Death of Klinghoffer'” (The Daily Beast)

    Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • New find! An English-language podcast on Israeli literature in translation.
  • Awaiting my attention: the latest issue of Lilith magazine.
  • “In honoring [Patrick] Modiano, the Nobel jury has embraced a tortuously and very specifically French-Jewish itinerary of belonging.” (Clémence Boulouque for Tablet)
  • “An outsider reading this extensively researched review of the way women are treated in the modern Jewish State might think that the author was describing Alabama of the 1950s.” (Ellis Shuman in a review of Elana Maryles Sztokman’s The War on Women in Israel.)
  • Guess who’s hosting the next Jewish Book Carnival? Fig Tree Books! Want to join in? Read this.

    • Shabbat shalom.