Culture
© Janice Rubin
In Song Together: For Linda Hirschhorn, Music is a Path to Transformation
Harmony is like drash. Singing a song simply is like pshat; harmonies give you the chance to interpret text. If you hear a lyric, especially sung in counterpoint, the words coming at a different time, you’ll get a different experience of what the words might mean, what’s important. Major or minor, syncopated or lullaby: those communicate so much. It’s important to understand the text, to try to find how my song matches my understanding of the text.
Birthright's Israel: The Political Bias of the Jewish Community’s Favorite Program
Birthright Israel is training right-wing activists, not informed and engaged American Jews. After seeing Israel on my own, it became clear that Birthright was not just guilty of failing to provide differing perspectives on Israel’s current situation, but was bending over backwards in order to ensure that we never saw a balanced picture of Israel.
Getting Beyond Outreach: Web 2.0 Judaism
I told the Federation rep, “You’d have to transfer power and resources from a top-down agenda to a listening agenda. You’d have to grant a voice to people who aren’t major donors yet. You’d have to message differently, write differently, even think differently about what your relationship with your constituents is supposed to look like.”
They laughed a bit and said, “That’s not going to happen.”
Digging in the Dirt... in Israel and L.A.
Stacie Chaiken writes, “I cannot simplify my relationship with Israel any more than I can simplify my relationship with my mother.” Read an excerpt from her solo play “The Dig” here, and see it in person at the Zeek L.A. Launch Event on Thursday, May 12.
The Listener: Memory, Lies, Art, Power
Holocaust literature must now exceed hundreds of thousands of volumes, the rise of Hitler to power in Germany itself thousands more tomes, but comic art has been sparse. David Lester’s new volume is a remarkable contribution to the genre.
In Which I Discover LA is not NYC
A longtime Jewish New Yorker expands her horizons. Excerpted from Zeek’s new Spring/Summer 2011 print issue, focused on Los Angeles. Join us May 12 for the launch party in LA!
Holy longing, holy language: Yehoshua November’s "God’s Optimism"
A wordless niggun I know asks why a soul enters the world, and then answers “to know God.” Surely that is the answer these poems provide.
The New Jewish Literature
We are witnessing a new era of Jewish writing in the United States, and as its readers we are particularly pleased to be in a position to watch it develop.
Rethinking Modern Hebrew Literature: A Review of Shachar M. Pinsker's Literary Passports
Hebrew literature did not begin in Palestine. It began in Europe, as part of a distinctly modernist approach to 20th century European Jewish life.
Merle Feld Finds Her Words
Liturgy and family, awe and anger, these mixed ingredients produce a book best savoured in small bites.
Fiction: Girl's Night Out
The setting: Rosh Chodesh in the woods. Two long-time lovers, newly separated. A fire. And then, three men appear: “‘You shittin us. You witches! Look, there’s candles.’ He notices the tambourine, lying in the dirt.”
Sarah Glidden's Israel
In Israel, the conflation of the personal and the political is unavoidable, where the simple fact of what neighborhood, city, or part of the country you live in has implications far beyond yourself.
“Certainly, the Jew is the Very Devil Incarnate”: Rethinking Antisemitism in the Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice provides us with a psychological portrait not of the Jews, but of antisemites, whose hatred relieves them from guilt while simultaneously helping them achieve a selfish goal.
What Have I in Common with Jews? A Review of Radical Poetics
Kafka asks, What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself!” This thought guides the essays collected in Radical Poetics, a new anthology by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris.
Poem: Disgrace
Daniel Morris, Radical Poetics co-editor, offers Zeek an example of radical poetics.
Poem: THERE’S ONLY ONE GOD AND YOU’RE NOT IT
Radical Poetics co-editor Stephen Paul Miller offers Zeek an example of radical poetics.
Ginsberg's Kaddish
Authors
Bill Morgan’s new edition of Kaddish finally gives us a full picture of Ginsberg’s mother, to whom the poem is dedicated.
Fiction: Girl's Night Out
A rosh chodesh turns dark when three men break into their campsite and accuse them of witchcraft.
Klutzy Klezmer: Zeek's First Klezmer Liner Note Contest
Bad spelling, weird mashups, yutz yiddish–can you beat klezmer musicians at their own game?
Intellectual in Translation: An Interview with Ilan Stavans
Can an Ashkenazi edit a Sephardi anthology? Are there Jewish public intellectual role models today? What should be the role of identity politics?
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