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Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

by Erika Dreifus on
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Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
  • The application deadline is approaching for “Great Jewish Books,” a new, free summer program for rising high school juniors and seniors at the Yiddish Book Center. Listen to the Yiddish Book Center’s Academic Director, Josh Lambert, speak with Aaron Lansky about the program, and about an exemplary short story: Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.”
  • The March 2012 issue of Poetry magazine features a section on “The Poetry of Kabbalah.”
  • The archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee are going online. Joseph Berger’s article includes the tidbit that Canadian author David Bezmozgis “is working on a novel about the Jewish experience in Crimea. He has tapped the archives to research a Joint-sponsored movement in the 1920s and ’30s to turn penniless shtetl and ghetto Jews into farmers on Soviet collective farms.”
  • Last Sunday, I went to see the Emma Lazarus exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. It will be there for several more months. Try to see it!
  • It’s not online, but my latest poem, “Dayenu” is featured in the new (March-April) issue of Moment magazine. (Page 28 for all of you subscribers!). But Clifford May’s important essay is online.

    • Shabbat shalom!

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
  • Did you miss the Jewish Book Council’s Twitter Book Club chat with Anna Solomon this week? You can read the transcript here. Next up for the club: Nathan Englander (March 27) and Natasha Solomons (April 26).
  • On “Good Letters,” the Image journal blog, poet Rick Chess reflects on listening, psalms, and Night.
  • The latest issue of Hadassah magazine features a profile of author Cynthia Ozick.
  • If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, you have the opportunity to attend a pretty spectacular-looking BookFest at the JCC of San Francisco. Take a peek at Sunday’s schedule.
  • Some controversy is swirling around Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox.
  • Washington Jewish Week (based in Rockville, Md.) is looking for a Senior Writer.

    • Shabbat shalom!

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    by Erika Dreifus on
    2
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
  • This week, one of the little ones in Auntie Erika’s life turned 8, and as per usual, he received a birthday gift of a book. I sent him Richard Michelson’s Lipman Pike: America’s First Home Run King, which was recently named a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Young Readers. Check out this interview with Mr. Michaelson (part of the latest blog tour featuring Sydney Taylor Award titles).
  • The above-mentioned interview pointed me to Richard Michaelson’s website, where I discovered this essay Michaelson published some years back, on writing outside one’s own racial/cultural experience.
  • Win a copy of Joan Leegant’s wonderful novel, Wherever You Go.
  • Chas Newkey-Burden (“OyVaGoy”), presents a list of recommended books about Israel.
  • Terrific essay by Sara Ivry for Tablet on a Judy Blume classic, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself.
  • The Jewish Book Council has announced the winner and runner-up for this year’s Sami Rohr Prize: “This year’s prize is for non-fiction and is awarded to journalist Gal Beckerman. His book, When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the history of the Soviet Jewry movement. The judges believe Beckerman’s work shows ‘his clear commitment to becoming a storyteller for the Jewish people.’ This is Beckerman’s first book. The runner-up is Oxford lecturer Abigail Green, for her biography, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Belknap Press of Harvard University). She receives a $25,000 prize.”
  • Sample excerpts (translated by Jessica Cohen) from Israeli author Alex Epstein’s forthcoming collection, For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings.
  • You’ll find a (somewhat overwhelming) list of intriguing new titles in Jewish fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in The Jewish Week‘s spring arts preview.
  • And as London’s Jewish Book Week celebrates its 60th anniversary, it attempts to list 60 great Jewish books of the past six decades.

    • Shabbat shalom!

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    by Erika Dreifus on
    7
    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
  • The New York Times divulges author Nathan Englander’s Sunday routine.
  • Speaking of Nathan Englander, not everyone will agree with Adam Kirsch’s take on his latest work, but you can’t deny that Kirsch’s conclusion is tantalizing and provocative: “Perhaps the great Jewish fiction of the near future will have to be less psychological and social than is currently the norm, and more explicitly political. And perhaps the great dividing line in contemporary Jewish life is not the one between religious and secular Jews, but between those who see themselves as members of a historical Jewish nation, and those who find such an identity archaic or delusional.”
  • JTA, “the global news service of the Jewish people,” is hiring.
  • New graduate program in Jewish cultural arts.
  • Deborah Feldman’s new memoir, Unorthodox, is making waves. Read all about it.

    • Shabbat shalom!

    Paired Writing Contests on “The Catskills and the Holocaust”

    by Erika Dreifus on
    2

    I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before: paired writing contests–one in fiction and one in nonfiction–as part of a book project, Summer Haven: How the Catskills Experienced the Holocaust, edited by Holli Levitsky, Professor of English and Director of Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and Phil Brown, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, “which will provide a locus for literature exploring the experience of the Holocaust in the Catskills.”

    Clicking the link above, you’ll find much more explanation about these contests. I’ll just give you some basics: no entry fees indicated and deadlines of July 1, 2012. For each contest, the winner will receive $500 and up to $500 for travel costs to present the work at the November 2012 Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium in Miami. Winning works will also be published in the Levitsky/Brown book.