Words of the Week (Or, Why Nicholas Kristof Has Lost Credibility With Me)

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“In his recent columns, [Nicholas] Kristof discusses the occupation as if it came about through Israeli avarice and greed alone. He manages to write about the situation in Gaza with hardly a reference to the rocket attacks that led to the Israeli blockade; he writes about the security barrier as if it wasn’t built to stop a flood of suicide bombers from the West Bank. Kristof is a smart columnist but he undermines himself by refusing to acknowledge what [Thomas] Friedman understands, that the Middle East is maddeningly complicated, and that what appears to be easy-to-understand often isn’t.”

Source: Jeffrey Goldberg

My only disagreement here with the greatness that is Goldblog is in the use of the word “comically” elsewhere in the post, as in: “Read Friedman’s column carefully; it seems to me he’s talking directly to Kristof, whose writing on the Middle East has become a bit comically one-sided.” Emphasis is mine. I find nothing comical about Kristof’s columns about Israel. I find them shameful and infuriating.

High Holiday Poetry Contest 2010

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

MyJewishLearning is running a High Holiday Poetry Contest–and you’re invited to participate.

Submitted poems “can be funny, or serious, or both. They can rhyme. They can be long (though we are from the Internet short-attention-span-generation). We want to be entertained, and we want to be inspired.”

Submit by August 25. Winning entries will be published online in time for Rosh Hashanah.

There will be prizes!

For more info, check MyJewishLearning.

(via the Jewish Book Council)

My Machberet Receives A Beautiful Blogger Award

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Our friends at the Jewish Book Council recently nominated us for a Beautiful Blogger Award (thank you, again!). To claim this prize, we need to share seven little-known facts about My Machberet…and pass the award on to seven other bloggers.

So here are some things you may not know about My Machberet and the blogger behind it.

1. The Hebrew name of My Machberet’s author is Yocheved. I am named for my maternal grandmother’s mother (“Yettie”), who was born in Galicia in 1891 and died in Brooklyn in 1931.

2. One of my earliest and favorite childhood reads was a beat-up, falling-apart storybook that was kept at the home of my paternal grandparents (I think it was my dad’s when he was a child–our copy, which I now possess, is from the second printing in 1948). Its title: Habibi and Yow: A Little Boy and His Dog. It is through this book that I first learned about many Jewish holidays, blessings, and traditions. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice reading it to me….

3. I’ve attended Hebrew School/religious instruction in Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform settings.

4. Since the summer of 1978, I have been a proud Reform Jew.

5. The first published writing to earn me a paycheck was a poem that appeared in Young Judaean magazine (I was 15 when I wrote it).

6. I resigned from the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) in 2006 when the then-president of the organization refused to stop using the NBCC blog as a bully pulpit for his own anti-Israel preachings (and harassed me personally when I objected to the practice). Now that he has moved on to other projects, I occasionally consider rejoining. But the experience left me with a lot of bad feelings.

7. My soon-to-be-unveiled new website will feature a resource section tailored to Jewish writing/writers.

And now, please allow me to introduce another seven “beautiful bloggers”:

The Arty Semite
The Boston Bibliophile
Brave New Words
Jeffrey Goldberg (if you’re a regular reader of My Machberet, you knew that that one was coming!)
Jew Wishes
Jewish Muse
What Would Phoebe Do

I hope that you find all of these blogs as interesting, informative, and inspiring as I do!