“If Moses had chosen to bring us to America, our problem would have been easy, but he did not choose to do so, and he is not here to discuss it.”
Chaim Weizmann, quoted in Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936 (p. 200; attributed to a meeting in London in February 1939).
I hardly wish to quarrel with Chaim Weizmann, but I’m not so sure that the problem would have been “easy”; “easier,” quite likely.
Most Fridays the Practicing Writing blog shares writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend. But it’s been an excruciating week for so many of us. And frankly, I’ve paid next-to-no attention to garden-variety news from the writing and publishing spheres.
On Wednesday, however, I received an email from Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based global nonprofit organization that I’ve admired for many years. The email introduced a “mini-lesson” titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region.”
The resource isn’t perfect. (What resource is?) But one of its segments impressed me as something that, though intended for educators and students, could be clarifying for writers as well, in our work and in the rest of our lives. It’s a section titled “Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
This week, I’ll share a single sentence from a novel I’ve just finished reading:
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Toward the end of each week, the My Machberet blog presents a collection of links, drawn primarily from the world of Jewish books and writing.
(more…)It’s hopeless. I will never be caught up with all the reading that I want to do—not even within the subset of my reading that can be categorized as “reading of Jewish interest.”
And yet! I haven’t yet given up on assembling lists like this one, of brand-new (as in published this week) and soon-to-be-published titles on my radar for the first half of 2021. (Again, let’s try to ignore the fact that I have yet to finish reading all the titles I’ve shared on previous lists of this sort!)
I couldn’t fit cover images from all 18 titles within this pretty image. Please scroll down to find the full list, listed (more or less) in chronological order, with January’s releases posted first.
Three quick things.
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