Jewish Poet Research Articles

Ir ort oyf der velt/ Her place in the world.Irena Klepfisz’s Secular Jewish Identity

This study explores the concept of Jewish secularism through the works of Irena Klepfisz, a Polish-born, New York-based Jewish poet. Rooted in the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, activein the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Klepfi sz’s identity and poetry are examined against thebackdrop of Jewish history, secularism, and feminism. Her unique notion of secular Jewish identity,shaped by her Bundist upbringing, Holocaust trauma, and engagement with post-war feministmovements, is highlighted. Klepfisz’s poetry, especially her 1986 essay “Secular Jewish Identity”,serves as a focal point, illustrating the role of literary scholarship in forming a post-war Jewishsecular identity. This identity is enriched by her experiences as a Holocaust survivor, feminist,and lesbian. The study aims to present Klepfisz’s version of contemporary secular Jewish identity,offering insights into how her readers might resonate with her radical blend of secularism, feminism,and Jewish cultural heritage.

Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship?

In the wake of Black Atlantic terror, enslavement, colonialism and violence, is there a place for literature? Where is there a place for the author? In other words, to rethink poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question, where is there a place for Black Atlantic literature and authorship? Proposing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the window through which to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the place for/of literature and authorship as Gilroy thinks them through an engagement with Richard Wright’s life and work, and also through the work of other Black Atlantic authors, primarily C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. These figures show that the Black Atlantic author must persist in tenaciously writing through and within the violence that defines their experiences, revealing the necessity of such literature and the importance of producing such a literary practice. This essay poses that there is no place for Black Atlantic authorship if the author is not grappling, writing, and “living with,” as Toni Morrison would suggest, the unspeakable violence and absolute terrors of experience—scenes of horror must be (re)made through cultural production or there can be no poesis. This process of transformation amid (dis)location is grounded in the Black Atlantic experience of terror and diaspora, about which Gilroy writes, concluding his final chapter with an analysis of the Jewish diasporic experience. Because this essay engages a Jewish poet’s provocation in order to think the Black Atlantic, it is crucial to interrogate both the significance of this invocation and Gilroy’s assessment of the intimate interconnection and solidarity between the Black and Jewish experiences.

The Rumble of a Locomotive, Traumatizing Screams, and Mortal Dance: Firsthand Poetic Testimonies Haunted by the Sounds of the Holocaust

Abstract This article analyzes the relationship between Holocaust trauma and firsthand poetic testimonies through the lens of literary acoustics. Specifically, it explores the work of three Jewish poets, Stanisław Wygodzki, Ilona Karmel, and Stanisław Jerzy Lec, who wrote in Polish of their tragic experiences in the Nazi camps. The article compares these poetical works to involuntary flashbacks composed of haunting sounds that recall trauma and violence and applies the concept of thantosonics to these auditory memories. In particular, the author notes the importance of trains as not only an auditory motif, but also as the metrical underpinning of the verses, and as a point of juxtaposition against sounds of innocence in the Holocaust soundscape. Furthermore, the article also explores the imagery of folk dance as a kind of danse macabre, as well as instances of involuntary sonic identification with the perpetrators.

Rhyming Jewish: Secular Jewish poetry in nineteenth-century Italy

Poetry has always played a fundamental role in Italian Jewish culture. From the Middle Ages on, there has been an uninterrupted production of poems. In spite of its relevance, variety, and long timespan, however, academic attention on Italian Jewish poetry has not been abundant and has mostly focused on a few characters and themes: medieval piyyut, the medieval poet Immanuel of Rome, and the Renaissance. Mirroring a general trend of Italian Jewish historiography and literary studies, which have so far mainly focused on the Renaissance and the twentieth century, nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poetry has almost been left out of the picture. This paper wishes to offer a contribution that may help fill this gap, by presenting three rather different Italian Jewish poets, spanning the long nineteenth century: Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), David Levi (1816-1898), and Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935). The purpose of this paper is to offer a portrait of nineteenth-century Italian Jewish poetry, focusing on its secular manifestations and catching the opportunity for some reflections on the definition of secular Jewish canon.

A Few Words More about Victorian Women Writers and Germany: George Eliot and Amy Levy

Abstract This article revisits the relation between George Eliot and Amy Levy (1861–89), a lesbian New Woman Jewish poet, novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Levy’s most familiar response to Eliot is a scene in Reuben Sachs (1889), Levy’s last novel, which mocks Eliot’s portrayal of Jewish characters in Daniel Deronda (1876). But Levy was an avowed admirer of Eliot in her early life and alluded to Eliot positively in the short story “Between Two Stools” (1883). In considering Eliot’s potential legacy for Levy, this article examines their shared representation of psychic experience in “The Lifted Veil” (1859) and “The Recent Telepathic Incident at the British Museum” (1887), their shared consideration of conflicts between women’s intellectual aspirations and domesticity in Armgart (1870) and “Xantippe” (1880), and their shared representations of persecution of the Roma in The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and “Run to Death” (1879).

Ashkenazi Literary Diaspora in The Argentina Of the Junta Military: The Poetic Legacy of Juan Gelman, Tamara Kamenszain, Alicia Borinsky, And Alicia Kozameh

The following research intends to trace the tradition that was forged by the Ashkenazi literary Diaspora via a comprehensive examination of the work of four Argentinean Jewish poets of Eastern-European Ashkenazi descent [1]. All of whom were forced to leave Argentina and live in exile either in Mexico or the United States. During the period of Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976-1983) [2]. The nation was suspended within a dimension of viselike terror vis-à-vis countless encounters with the notorious Junta Military. The most notable manifestation of the Junta’s savagery was the alarming state of disquiet and subsequent “disappearance” of approximately 13,000 individuals perceived as a threat to the established order. A large percentage of the vanished faction were of Jewish origin as it is a prevailing anti-Semitic truism that Jews are viewed as intellectuals, and, as such, harbor Socialist leanings. Among these individuals are the four following poets, whose works were extensively awarded and honored: Alicia Borinsky [3]. Guggenheim Fellowship and Latino Literature Prize, Juan Gelman Juan Rulfo Award and Cervantes Prize, Tamara Kamenszain [4]. Guggenheim Fellowship and Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal, and Alicia Kozameh Argentine National Poetry Prize. The most obvious link between these four extraordinary individuals and writers is that they were all forced into exile either in Mexico or the United States, however, one cannot overlook other existing similarities, such as they are all Jewish, all individuals of Eastern-European Ashkenazi descent, and heirs to a body of work created by writers that were part of the Diaspora.

In Dreams I Am a Person of Color

This paper is a journey into my inner life as a Jewish poet whose family fled Europe because of Nazi persecution. In dreams I encounter Black kindred spirits who spark a series of eight dream sonnets. They are aspects of Self. They speak to the connections between Black and Jewish experience and culture. I share my experience of the transformational process of making art out of unconscious imagery, and also as an expression of intergenerational trauma. It is a potent way to work with and heal ancient wounds. I am influenced in this endeavor by August Wilson’s play, Gem of the Ocean, in which the aged matriarch, Aunt Ester, takes lost souls on an imaginal journey to the “City of Bones” deep in the ocean—the ancestors’ realm—where the spirits of those who did not survive the Middle Passage congregate. Aunt Ester knows a core truth: one must touch down to the burial ground in one’s cultural psyche to know the truth of one’s path in life. She is the spiritual guide who accompanies me. The form of my poems is influenced by the American sonnets of Terrance Hayes. My dream sonnets borrow Hayes’ intense, unrhymed, 14-line structure. Hayes also shows up in a dream, which becomes the first sonnet in the series. He is the creative animus who enables this work.

Leona Caetani’ye Göre Kâ’b b. Eşref’in Ölümünü Meşru Kılan Sebepler

Orientalism is an institutional activity from the West that studies the Eastern world in fields such as religion, language, science, thought, art, and history and produces value judgments about the East. Those who are engaged in this work are orientalists. Orientalists have closely examined Islamic civilization and its sources by going into the field and have produced many works. However, their attitude to get familiar with Eastern Islamic society was based on their superiority and the denigration of Islamic civilization. They made groundless claims against the most crucial source for Muslims, the Holy Qurʾān and hadiths. One of these orientalists was the Italian Leona Caetani. His work Annali Dell'Islām, which he wrote from an Orientalist point of view, was considered by Westerners as a school book in Islamic history and was accepted as a reference work in its field. This work, translated into Ottoman by Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, caused great resentment and anger among the intellectuals of the Republic of Turkey at the time and led to the writing of refutations. The massacre of Ka'b Ashraf, which took place in the third year of the Hijrah, in Caetani's History of Islam, has always been a debate in Islamic history. With the spread of the Prophethood in Arabia, different balances emerged, and with the migration from Mecca to Medina, this situation took on another aspect. The new religion could not get used to the change in the balances in Medina, and the Jews, who could not digest this situation, embarked on hostile activities to humiliate the Prophet and Islam. One of these people was the Jewish poet Ka'b b. Ashraf, did his best to reveal his enmity to the Prophet Muhammad and Muslims on this path leading to his murder. His enmity, which peaked with the victory of the Muslims in the Badr War, increased even more, and the defeat of the polytheists, whom he called "the ruler of mankind", aroused great sadness in him. He went to the city of Mecca with his entourage, saying, "If Muhammad really killed so many people, the earth is better than the earth above it". He wrote poems to arouse the people there and to keep their pain even more vivid. Caetani, in his History of Islam, expressed what a dangerous and disturbing enemy Ka'b b. Ashraf was by saying that when he returned to Medina, he made violent attacks on the Prophet and the new religion, and even tried to seduce Muslim women, in other words, he did everything possible to earn the Prophet's most hatred and to become a man who angered him the most. In the face of such a dangerous enemy, the Prophet asked his companions, "Who can save me from the speech of Ka'b b. Ashraf? Because he disturbs Allah and His Messenger". Thereupon, Muhammad b. Maslama accepted this job. Together with Ka'b's milk brother Abu Nailah b. Salamah, Abbad b. Bishr, Haris b. Aws and Abu Abs, made a plan to eliminate Ka'b b. Ashraf slaughtered him—the killing of Ka'b b. Ashraf took place for various reasons and was not a selfish and unlawful killing. The background of this event with its causes and consequences in the historical process should be thoroughly analyzed, and inference should be made without focusing on the arbitrariness of the killing of Ka'b b. Ashraf. Caetani, who makes anti-Islamic discourses on many subjects and does not hesitate to express his opinion when necessary, did not make a counter-discourse on the massacre of Ka'b b. Ashraf in his History of Islam. In our study, we will evaluate Caetani's views by centering them.

REBELLION AND REJECTION OF HERITAGE IN MODERN HEBREW POETRY

This research deals with the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage in modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry is considered a type of literature and one of its important basic forms. One of the literary genres, poetry has played an important role in shaping the cultural identity of nations throughout ancient and modern times. Where the Jewish writers distinguished themselves in this genre as one of the forms of social awareness, which occupies an important place and occupies an e ssential space in mobilizing societies and peoples and enlightening them to struggle for their liberation and crystallizing their revolutionary and civilizational awareness, in addition to the aesthetic function of poetry as an artistic value added to life. The phenomenon of rebellion and the rejection of the heritage emerged in Hebrew poetry in Israel and the departure from the official line of the ruling establishment in the wake of the wars that Israel waged with neighboring countries, the continuation of the occupation, the control of Jewish settlers over the Palestinian lands, and the increase in violence and injustice against the Palestinians. And the outbreak of the Palestinian uprisings since (1987-1993) and (2000) and Israel launched a war on Lebanon in 2006. All of this uttered cries of rebellion and rejection, and then expressed it in many poems. As a result, the phenomenon of rebellion and rejection poetry expanded in recent years. Hence, it can be said that the emergence of the literature of rebellion and rejection in Israel and the refusal of some Jewish writers to politicize literature and recruit it is tantamount to protesting and rebelling against the government and its institutions because they are trying to impose political dictates on their literary and intellectual writings... We will explain in this study the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage by Jewish poets to the situation The ruling political and repressive practices in Israel and their impact on many poets as fertile material that poets derived and expressed in their poems

Languages and Morality in Postwar Europe: The German and Austrian Abandonment of Yiddish

Abstract In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust (קאַטאַסטראָפע Katastrofe in Yiddish) endows the continent’s societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide’s main victims – Jews – exist no longer in Europe as a community with their specific Yiddish language and culture. Due to the twin-like closeness between Yiddish and German, prior to the war, Yiddish speakers ensured a world-wide popularity for the German language. After 1945, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors and Jewish poets exorcised and reinvented the then-murderers’ language of German, so that poetry could be written in it again. In reciprocation, Germany and Europe – shockingly and quite incomprehensibly – abandoned their duty to preserve and cultivate Yiddish language and culture as a necessary “inoculation” against another genocide. Forgetting about this duty imperils Europe and its inhabitants; the danger now is sadly exemplified by Russia’s ongoing genocidal-scale war on Ukraine. Not a single Yiddish library exists in today’s Europe, which is an indictment in itself.

One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, and: A Detective’s Complaint, and: Take Up and Read by Shimon Adaf

Reviewed by: One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, and: A Detective’s Complaint, and: Take Up and Read by Shimon Adaf Rachel S. Cordasco Shimon Adaf One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset A Detective’s Complaint Take Up and Read Trans. Deborah Bragan-Turner. New York. Harper. 2022. 288 pages. Click for larger view View full resolution SHIMON ADAF’S Lost Detective Trilogy embodies many worlds, attitudes, genres, and voices. Like Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, it contains multitudes. Philosophy, literary theory, immunology, temporal rifts, and religious texts mingle together in this trilogy to produce a work that attempts to mimic what Adaf believes is a deep truth: that people are not closed systems but nodes in a network of relationships. People are constantly exchanging bacteria and viruses with one another, their perceptions of time and space don’t line up, and one person’s individual trauma as a guinea pig in a concentration camp can be the portal to a major discovery about the nature of human consciousness. Like Adaf ’s previous novel in English, Sunburnt Faces, the Lost Detective Trilogy never loses sight of itself as a literary work. This might make the books sound pretentious, but they are actually the opposite: they are attempts to lodge a creative object, born of a human mind, squarely in the space between the intangible and tangible aspects of our lives. A book has weight and takes up space, but the weightless words within it are woven together by a mind that exists as part of a brain, which is attached to a brain stem, which receives blood and oxygen and impulses from the rest of the body. As one major character declares in the third book, Take Up and Read, “the true key” to understanding what a human is is the immune system, that “its entire function was to recognize what belonged in the body and what was foreign to it. It learned and it had a memory, and it was founded on the fact that the body is a microbiome.” Adaf has written a story that incorporates the latest scientific ideas about the importance of the immune system and age-old theories about the relationship between mind and body. Some have called this a meta detective trilogy, and indeed books (those already written, those in the process of being written, those being passed from hand to hand) appear on many pages. Adaf refers to the trilogy as “the chronicles of Elish Ben Zaken” (the protagonist), channeling the religious texts that figure strongly in Take Up and Read. Works by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love-craft, S. Y. Agnon, Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and many works of children’s fantasy populate the trilogy, all but screaming to be noticed and incorporated into our understanding of Adaf ’s project. “Genre” as an idea is dissected and experimented upon. Central to the mystery at the heart of the trilogy is a Jewish poet from Morocco named Perotz who, after being captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald, becomes the subject of a typhus experiment. When infected with a certain kind of typhus bacteria, he doesn’t become ill because he’s naturally immune. Nonetheless, his immune system’s reaction to the invader causes a strange change in his consciousness. He starts seeing shadowy figures (which others around him can also sometimes see) and losing time. Later scientists studying this phenomenon believe that such a reaction as this “leaves an opening for study of the structure of reality.” I focus on this aspect of the trilogy because it anchors the entire story, and it is what I find most fascinating about the work as a whole. Yet it is but a small part explained at the end of the third book. According to Adaf, these are not books in a trilogy but “chronicles,” made up of “the detective novel One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset,” “the meta-detective A Detective’s Complaint,” [End Page 64] and “the anti-detective novel Take Up and Read.” Inextricably tied to the events of these books is the music of Dalia Shushan...

Shāhīn the Kalīmī and his Torah as a mirror for Jewish-Iranian culture

ABSTRACT The history of Jews in Iran goes back to a time before Iran existed as a political entity. Since about 2700 years, Jews have been living on Iranian territory. In Iran, they are called Kalīmī, derived from the Persian name for Moses, “Kalimūllāh” (“The One, who speaks with God”). Jews formed a branch of Iranian culture and history due to their long history of settlement and dissemination on Iranian territory. Judeo-Persian literature is part of this culture and history. This rich heritage consists of Persian language, written in Hebrew letters. Its contents relate to the Torah, the Talmud or Jewish history. Judeo-Persian has its own standing in the Persian language and literature and provides us with a picture of the identity of the Jews of Iran. In this paper I analyse verses of the Torah, composed by the fourteenth-century Jewish poet Shāhīn. This literary work contains different aspects of Judaism, Islam, Persian Literature, Hebrew idioms and writing as well as Iranian culture, which all constitute the identity of Iranian Jews.

Ilmar Laabani (luule)dialoog Paul Celani ja Nelly Sachsiga / Ilmar Laaban’s (poetic) dialogue with Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs

Ilmar Laabani (luule)dialoog Paul Celani ja Nelly Sachsiga / Ilmar Laaban’s (poetic) dialogue with Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs

Lamentations by a Jewish poet on his skin affliction: Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a highly respected medieval Jewish poet and philosopher who lived in Spain. He suffered from a distressing, chronic cutaneous disorder of unknown etiology, which he poetically portrays in his poetry by using fantastic and grotesque imagery derived from Biblical sources. This contribution provides examples of Ibn Gabirol's remarkable poetry, which spotlights the immense human suffering and misery that can result from skin diseases.

'What Has Been Written Upon the Forehead, the Eye Must See': An Arabic-Jewish Author Between Baghdad and an Israeli Transit Camp

As an integral part of Arab society since the pre-Islamic period, Jews participated in the making of Arabic literature. We know of prominent Jewish poets such as al-Samawʾal ibn ʿᾹdiyāʾ in the sixth century A.D. and Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl in al-Andalus in the thirteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, Arabic literature in fuṣḥā (standard Arabic) written by Jews witnessed a great revival, especially in Iraq and Egypt, but this revival was cut short as a casualty of Zionism and Arab nationalism and the conflict between them. We are currently witnessing the demise of Arabic literature written by Jews; the Arabic language among Jews will probably remain mostly a tool of the military establishment and the intelligence systems as encapsulated in the dictum 'know your enemy' instead of being a medium for coexistence and knowing the Other. The article concentrates on the literary activities of one of the most talented Iraqi-Jewish authors, Shalom Darwīsh (1913-1997), whose promising anticipated literary future in Arabic literature encountered a deadlock following the aforementioned exclusion of Jews from 'Arabness'.

“The World Was Given Us to Fix It”

Abstract This article explores the ecopoetry written by three women poets who also identify themselves as Jewish poets: Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. It examines whether they employ any or some/all of the “emancipatory strategies” characteristic of the ecofeminist re-imagination of nature and human relationships with the natural world, seeking to answer several questions: How far can these poems be considered part of eco-Judaism? Does the fact that their authors are women also make them ecofeminist works? Does the poets’ Jewish feminist identity contribute to their ecopoetic call for ecological change?

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

Looking Back, or Re-visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets on “Lot’s Wife”

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. However, as opposed to the androcentric traditional midrash, the Jewish American women poets, who write midrashic-poetry, re-read the biblical story with a feminine/feminist lens, making what Alicia Ostriker calls “revisionist mythmaking.” As such, they very rarely take the first route, almost always highlighting Lot’s wife’s positive—female—aspects. In this article, I shall analyze nine poems written by American Jewish women poets from the 1980s until 2015, who draw on the biblical text in order to deal with contemporary issues or contextualize it in the modern period.

Evading Libitina

Abstract Under the sign of Libitina, the Roman goddess of burials and funerals invoked in Horace's Ode 3.30, this essay provides a celebratory introduction to the work of the Polish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–44), situating her within the cultural history of commemoration and consecration of the dead in Poland and the painful confrontation with the unburied dead of the Holocaust, of whom Ginczanka is one. Her best-known poem, a bitter parody of Juliusz Słowacki's “My Testament,” turns the Horatian notion of poetry as the most precious and enduring legacy on its head by construing the author's meager household possessions, looted after her denunciation to the Nazis in wartime, as the only offering her fellow citizens will cherish, while the text itself was actually brought as evidence in a postwar trial of the Polish woman she accuses in the poem and contributed to a conviction for collaboration. Using historian Thomas Laqueur's terms necro-sociability and necronominalism as competing impulses in a seemingly intractable struggle, this essay argues that it is possible to find in Ginczanka's joyful defiance of traditional accounts of body and spirit the point of departure for a poetics that claims a new freedom of imagination in the attempt to transcend the most stubborn of memory wars.

Resistance Today

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize.