Words of the Week: Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi
FWIW: Yossi’s account of his reactions, in particular—regarding the weeping, the rage, and the exhaustion—resonate with mine.
Posts Tagged‘Words of the Week’
Words of the Week: Howard Jacobson
From the Unholy podcast: “Howard Jacobson screamed ‘liar’ at the BBC every day for two years. Then he wrote a novel. Howl — hailed as a comic masterpiece — is the first serious post-October 7 novel: the story of a Jewish headmaster in South London who watches the educated world he believed in applaud a massacre and slowly lose his mind. Jacobson joins Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland to discuss the ungovernable rage behind the book, why he chose comedy as the vehicle for it, the friends he lost, and the question he and his wife have started asking each other: is it still safe to be here?”
Words of the Week: Nate Lebowitz
(more…)The Jewish home we fought to build — something earlier generations could have only dreamed of — has been described to me by some students as a place where open expressions of Jewish peoplehood can feel constrained. Students report that they were told earlier this year that there needed to be community conversation before an Israeli flag could be displayed in the JRC. Even taken at face value, that rationale reflects, in my view, a profound misunderstanding of Jewish identity. More broadly, it raises a deeper question about why expressions of Jewish identity — particularly those connected to Israel — are sometimes treated as contingent on communal discussion in spaces meant to serve Jewish students. For Jews, Israel is not simply a contemporary political question. The Land of Israel appears throughout the Tanakh, throughout Jewish liturgy, and throughout the covenantal memory of the Jewish people. Jerusalem lives in our prayers, our holidays, our blessings after meals, our fast days, our wedding ceremonies, and our rituals of mourning. For thousands of years, Jews facing east did not do so as a political gesture, but as an expression of covenant, memory, and peoplehood.
Words of the Week: In Response
As Passover concluded last week, yet another open letter was launched into the literary community. The creation of a self-described, self-congratulatory “concerned group of Jewish writers,” this letter—published in a highly visible and highly problematic “mainstream” outlet—is, in a word, outrageous. (In a few more words: It’s an attack on the Jewish Book Council [JBC] organization.)
My own visceral reaction upon reading the text was to recall a certain segment from the Passover Haggadah that many of us had so recently revisited.
At first, although I privately shared this response with some friends and colleagues, I opted not to say much publicly about this letter. For three reasons.
(more…)Words of the Week: “Shelter Lingo”
Just one page from the “The Underground Issue” (wartime) of the journal Balagan, which you can access on the Writing on the Wall website.