Jewish Poet Research Articles

Iosif Utkin: Jewish Poet and Fighter for Soviet Motherland

Artykuł poświęcony jest życiu i twórczości mało znanego sowiecko-żydowskiego poety Iosifa Utkina (1903–1944), który zginął podczas II wojny światowej. Ten wybitny twórca ciągle pozostaje nieznany na Zachodzie, a jego poezją rzadko zajmowali się nawet badacze rosyjskojęzyczni. Autorkę artykułu interesują trzy aspekty poezji Utkina: aspekt muzyczny, poezja wojskowa i wątki żydowskie. Aspekty te poddano analizie, gdyż stanowią centralne, najbardziej podstawowe elementy twórczości poety. Jednakże poezja Utkina nie ogranicza się do tych aspektów, dlatego też celowe wydaje się zbadanie występujących w niej motywów folklorystycznych, specyfiki gatunkowej, symboliki oraz opisów różnych rzemiosł i zawodów. W swojej poezji Utkin stworzył zaczarowany świat, świadczący o niezwykłym i błyskotliwym talencie artystycznym. Jego twórczość wyraża ducha dawnych czasów, romantyczną wiarę w sprawiedliwy komunizm, nadzieje, które rozwiały się wraz z końcem II wojny światowej i początkiem antysemickiej polityki Stalina, zwanej „mrocznymi latami sowieckiego żydostwa".

Klasik Arap Edebiyatında Yahudi Şairlere Düzenlenen Suikastlar

From the time that the Arabian tribes commenced to develop a poetic literature of their own, Jewish clans lived among them and spoke their language. The qasidas of the Jewish tribes of Arabia, to judge from the verses handed down, must be about as old as Arabic poetry. The Jewish poets played a significant role in the first years of Islam. Prophet Muhammad, the central figure of Islam, had many contacts with Jewish poets. But the Jewish leaders continued their resistance to Muhammad and their famous poets began a propaganda campaign against the prophet and his friends. The Jewish poets of Medina were known for insulting the Muslims of the city for obeying a religious leader not of their own kin. Thus they became the most significant political enemies of the nascent Islam. As a result of the anti-Islamic propaganda, Muhammad ordered to kill them because they composed poems that publicly ridiculed the local people who converted to Islam and allied with the prophet, calling for his assassination

قراءة نقْدِیَّة فی کتاب «الشعراء الیهود العرب»

في عام 1929م نشر الکاتب المصري اليهودي مراد فرج (ت 1956م) کتابه «الشعراء اليهود العرب»، وأهداه إلى جمعية المباحث التاريخية الإسرائيلية بمصر. وبث فيه من الدعاوى الباطلة والتأويلات المنحرفة لبعض ما ورد فيه من أشعار ما يدعو إلى قراءة الکتاب قراءة ناقدة، تبين بالدليل والحجة والبرهان بطلان هذه الدعاوى، وانحراف تلک التأويلات. وعلى الرغم من مرور ما يزيد على تسعين عاما منذ ظهور هذا الکتاب، إلا أنه لم يحظ بدراسة نقدية جادة، تکشف ما فيه من باطل وتقومه، وتبين ما فيه من خطأ وتصوبه. لذا يحاول هذا البحث أن يقوم بتلک المهمة، کاشفا عن وجه الحقيقة الذي تحاول إخفاءه دعاوى الکتاب الباطلة، ومبينا وجه الصواب الذي تحاول أن تواريه تأويلاته المنحرفة. الکلمات المفتاحية: الشعراء اليهود، شعر اليهود، العرب واليهود، مراد فرج. Read reviews in a book «Arab Jewish poets» Preparation Al-Hassan Abd Al-Latif Muhammad Al-Lawi Assistant Professor of Literature and Criticism at the Faculty of Arabic Language in Jerja «Al- Azhar University» Email: Elhasanahmed.2040@azhar.edu.eg Abstract: In 1929 CE, the Egyptian Jewish writer Murad Farag (d.1956 CE) published his book The Jewish and Arab Poets, and gave it to the Israeli Historical Investigation Association in Egypt. In it there are false claims and deviant interpretations of some of the poems contained in it that call for reading the book to read critically. Despite the passage of more than ninety years since the emergence of this book, it has not received a serious critical study that reveals its falsehood and corrects it, reveals its error and corrects it. Therefore, this research tries to perform that task, revealing the face of the truth that the book’s false claims are trying to conceal, and showing the face of the truth that it is trying to hide its perverted interpretations. key words: The Jewish Poets - Jewish poetry - Arabs and Jews - Murad Farag.

The (Inter-religious?) Rededication of an Arabic Panegyric by Judah al-Ḥarīzī

Abstract This article studies two versions of an Arabic panegyric by the Jewish poet Judah al-Ḥarīzī, one preserved in Hebrew (Judeo-Arabic) script and the other in Arabic script in a biographical dictionary by al-Mubārak ibn Aḥmad al-Mawṣilī (1197-1256). The Judeo-Arabic version was dedicated to a Jewish physician. While the version transmitted by al-Mawṣilī does not have a named addressee, it was likely dedicated to a Muslim. By reading the two versions as iterations of the same basic text accommodated to specific circumstances, this article demonstrates the ways in which the author modulated rhetoric to fit the social positions of the respective addressees. The article studies the dynamics of inter-religious praise and the Jewish internalization of Islamic concepts of political legitimacy.

Wielogłosowość i milczenie w poetyce żydowskiej — ,,gdy ciało staje się słowem”: kilka uwag o poezji Zuzanny Ginczanki

The article is an attempt at presenting an inspiring writing of Zuzanna Ginczanka (Polina Gincburg) who was a Ukrainian-born Jewish poet writing in Polish. Due to her multifarious identity, it is in her poetry that one finds voices that reverberate from various nations and cultures, which makes an original polyphonic, geographic and mythological texture. Ginczanka’s poetics venerates the body since, in her view, contrary to the dogma of incarnation, it was the ‘flesh that was made word’. In her poems it is the Songs of So gs whose physicality more than metaphoricity inspires the poetic images. It is also nature that becomes an incentive for the poetic creation, which proves that poetry derives from the Greek word poiesis . In the times of the Holocaust atrocities, the language of poetry became for her the ‘house of poetic Being’ and several geographical places served her as security which, however, she had to constantly abandon in fear of Nazi repressors. Her monumental poems, chief among which is ‘The Fire-Bird’, due to its orchestration and almost sonorous imagery can compare with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet of the eponymous title. Her attachment to the earth and the living place, no matter how insecure, brought about that several geo-poetic images can be traced in her poetic works.

‘Turn it Over and Over’ (Avot 5:22): American Jewish Women’s Poetry on Lot’s Wife

Abstract 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. 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.’ In this article, I shall focus on seven poems written from the 1980s through to 2014. I shall endeavor to evince the way(s) in which they make use of the biblical text, dealing with themes raised in the traditional midrash or re-reading the latter. I will show how by adducing to her emotions, longings and memories and even fear of the future, the poets portray Lot’s wife first and foremost as a woman.

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Daniel Morris (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination By Norman Finkelstein. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch treeAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. —"Birches" (1914) by Robert Frost Beginning a Shofar review on Jewish poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein's Like A Dark Rabbi with "Birches," Robert Frost's chestnut about a boy swinging on a branch in the woods? Really? Can a goyish pastoral pass as Jewish poetry? After reading Finkelstein, who argues Jewish poetry represents ambivalence toward the realms of earth and sky, I now think Frost, the New Hampshire woodsman who depicted purportedly un-Jewish tasks like chopping wood, mowing hay, and picking apples, may don the Dark Rabbi mantel. Think of "Mending Wall" as Frost's crypto-cabbalistic take on tikkun olam. Align "Acquainted with the Night" with Finkelstein's reading of Hugh Seidman and Michael Heller, Dark [End Page 319] Rabbis who, like Frost, convey uncertainty, rupture, and loss. With its representation of a boy swinging "towards heaven," but wanting to land because Earth is the "right place for love," Frost's "Birches" prefigures the work of Jewish-born authors like Chana Bloch's "Furniture," which, Finkelstein writes, "intertwines the divine and the domestic, the cosmic and the ordinary: the thunder in heaven is like moving furniture" (144). Finkelstein attends to poets who signify Jewishness when they embrace liminality. Heller, paradoxically, regards "between" as "foundational" and diaspora as a "new kind of homeland" (114). (An exception would be Allen Grossman, who defined holiness as contingent on acts of separation; Heller sees holiness as "revealed at the heart of the secular" [108].) Describing Heller's "Ode to the Sky on the Esplanade of the New" as a "Buddhist Ode to the West Wind," Finkelstein notes how Heller modulates from "transcendental heights to a poetics grounded in history" (123). Jewish ritual, quotidian action, and an appreciation of language as a crucial form of mediation between persons and realms of experience inform Heller's poetry to the point "no one can safely say where the sacred leaves off [and] where the profane begins" (123). The phrase "Like a Dark Rabbi," from the Pennsylvania Dutch-bred modernist Wallace Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (1918), by itself indicates Finkelstein's open mind about who can write a Jewish poem. Like other philosemites such as Robert Duncan and Joseph Donahue, whose poetry Finkelstein treats in his study, Stevens is not a Jew by birth, ethnicity, or religious practice. In fact, as biographer Paul Mariani writes, Stevens was xenophobic and antisemitic. Nonetheless, Stevens expresses a "fascination and strong affinity with Jewish spirituality and Jewish texts" (222). In "Auroras of Autumn," for example, he writes of "that crown and mystical cabala" (162). Finkelstein's interpretation of Stevens, Duncan, and Donahue as practitioners of a Jewish poetics turns on his definition of rabbi as an Emersonian scholar. Describing Stevens as a "seeker of occult wisdom" (226) who views "imagination as emanation" (231), Finkelstein places him "somewhere between, if not beyond, the religious and the secular" (226). Like Frost's speaker in "Birches," Stevens is a rabbi because he seeks extraterrestrial wisdom "for human purposes" (223). [End Page 320] Regarding "Auroras of Autumn" as imagining a "post-religious space of redemption," Finkelstein aligns Stevens with Jewish-born poets ranging from objectivists such as Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen to the contemporary formalist Henry Weinfield to Bloch, the Israeli anti-Zionist author and...

The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan

The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan Vivian Liska (bio) Translated by Ashraf Noor The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is often—and justifiably—associated with suspicion with regard to visual art, aesthetics, and literature, which he considers as secondary if not antagonistic to ethics. It is thus all the more significant that he maintains a constant interest in the work of a rare few writers and poets, particularly, in the early 1970s, that of the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, whose mother tongue was German. What is at stake in Levinas’s reading of Celan goes far beyond a simple commentary on this major oeuvre of post-war European literature. It aims at the heart of the relation between poetry and philosophy and of a frequently controversial interrogation in which important figures of modern Western philosophy participate. In the following remarks, the traces of this debate in Levinas’s writings, particularly in those relating to Judaism, will be delineated in view of a central motif: the question of place. Levinas’s rare writings on poetry configure the place and the non-place at the intersection—or rather at the locus of interaction—of history, philosophy, and poetry between Greek and Jew. A reflection on Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to poetry leads to a constellation of the following names: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan. These four figures conjoined paratactically form a chiasm as to the relationship between the poem, the place, and the Jew. Levinas and Celan meet at the outer poles of this figure of thought, at extremities whose relation is illuminated by the other two names, Blanchot and Hölderlin, which both unite and separate them. At the center of the chiasm is a name that is not expressed explicitly, but which nevertheless [End Page 699] constitutes the axis of this poetico-philosophical constellation: Martin Heidegger. This chiasm will be deployed in terms of a central motif: the question of place, more particularly the conceptual pairs of exile and Heimat, errancy and rootedness, homelessness and dwelling, all considered in respect to the poem, to poetry. In his essay titled “Paul Celan. De l’être à l’autre” (Paul Celan: From Being to the Other), first published in La Revue des Belles Letters in 1972, shortly after the poet’s suicide, Emmanuel Levinas implicitly retrieves and illustrates a central idea formulated in his earlier essay “La Trace de l’Autre” (The Trace of the Other). In this essay, Levi-nas distinguishes between Greek and Jew via the opposition between Ulysses’ and Abraham’s respective relations to place. Presenting a stark dichotomy, Levinas writes: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land” (1986, 348).1 Ulysses’ journey is directed towards the eventual return to his native land, his Heimat; for Levinas, this orientation signifies a turning in upon oneself and contrasts with Abraham’s departure, which is oriented solely towards a foreign destination, a territory that is, so far, nothing but a promise. Between Ulysses and Abraham, as envisaged by Levinas, the fundamental difference between Greek and Jew, between Homer and the Hebrew Bible is at stake. The Greek route remains that of Ulysses, whose protracted, adventure-laden journey through the world is in fact nothing other than a return to himself, to his native island—“complying with the Same, misapprehending the Other” 2—as opposed to “the Biblical movement of the Same towards the Other” (Levinas, 1996a, 51). The closure and totality re-established through the return homewards as final destination in the Greek experience contrast with the Jewish destination, which corresponds to an incessant movement towards the other. Levinas describes this movement, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as an indifference to land and soil: “Judaism has always been free with regard to place” (1990, 231).3 With this laudatory statement, Levinas seems to not only support the traditional idea of the Jew as the eternal wanderer, but also to affirm [End Page 700] exile as both a positive mode of existence and, metaphorically, as an ethical modality of thought opening towards a non-retrievable alterity. Levinas’s claim would...

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Maeera Y. Shreiber (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination Norman Finkelstein Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. $35.95 paperback. In 1991, poet-critic Allen Grossman initiated a new chapter in the study of Jewish poetry when he declared that, according to Jewish thought, the sacred and the poetic are fundamentally at odds with one another. Norman Finkelstein was among the first to really consider Grossman's intentionally provocative claim in a thoroughgoing way: first in Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (2001); then in numerous essays probing the question of midrashic poetics, the tension and relation between the secular and the sacred in experimental verse; and, most recently, in a wonderful piece "On the Poetics of a Jewish God" (co-written with poet Michael Heller). This latter piece deftly negotiates Gershom Sholem, Israeli poet Chaim Bialik, and contemporary scholar of religious thought Steven Wasserstrom—to craft an account of a poetics animated by a dynamic relation to the sacred. This account is fully realized in Finkelstein's latest book, Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination. This gathering of essays, some of which are expanded versions of earlier pieces while others are wholly new pieces written expressly for this occasion, is, as the author puts it, "an expression of devotion"(xv)—a dedicated and learned disciple's account of a rich and multi-faceted aesthetic as well as a spiritually-inflected enterprise. Finkelstein sets up some of the terms informing these essays in the opening chapter, focusing upon the "Two Shapiros" (1)—Karl and Harvey, both of whose names are now all but lost to history. Indeed, one of the gifts Finkelstein offers is the opportunity to discover new or overlooked voices. I was happy to spend a bit of time with Harvey Shapiro, whose "brilliantly understated style…epitomizes the endlessly paradoxical questions and answers that secular Jewish life provokes" (14). After working through some of the ways secularity animates Jewish verse, Finkelstein turns to consider the status of authentically Jewish languages in the making of Jewish American poems. For a long while, Jewish poets writing in English were seen as distinctly disadvantaged, not having access to the cultural, conceptual and spiritual resources inherent in Yiddish or Hebrew. But drawing upon the work of scholars such as Sander Gilman, Finkelstein proposes another mode of approach, noting how Yiddish, for example, functions as a "ghost" (18) or "hidden" (18) language informing not only the work of poet Jerome Rothenberg but also Finkelstein's own "post vernacular" (19) lyrics. This [End Page 162] move is but one instance of what makes the book appealing, as Finkelstein brings both a scholarly investment to the subject and an ongoing creative sensibility. Like a Dark Rabbi should appeal to a range of readers. Experts in the field will appreciate Finkelstein's carefully argued and attentive close readings; his discussion of Allen Grossman's ambitious poem "The Piano Player Explains Himself," a stunning but difficult example of this poet's prophetic reach, is a beautiful instance of Finkelstein's skill. Other chapters—such as the lively account of Charles Reznikoff, an important figure in twentiethcentury Jewish American writing—are well-suited to the non-professional who wants to learn more about the important role poetry plays in a literary field that often overlooks the genre altogether. In addition to working with well-known figures, Finkelstein works hard to expand the canon of Jewish American poetry, calling attention to poets whose names do not typically come to mind when the subject is Jewish poetics. Even more importantly, Finkelstein makes a concerted effort to expand the list to include two women poets whose works are only now beginning to garner the attention they deserve. His discussion of Chana Bloch showcases a poet who is able to name her doubt quite frankly without redemptively claiming it as part of a diasporic identity—and without ever backing away from her conviction in the deep wisdom to be gleaned from Jewish texts. Counterbalancing Bloch's sharp-edged...

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) and Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant

Ties That Bind: Finding Meaning in the Making of Sacred Textiles

I was a novice weaver when I began constructing a Rakusua-Buddhist ceremonial garment-as an initiation into a spiritual community in my hometown. Years later, in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, I was drawn to an early 19th century Tallit Katan, a ritual silk undergarment that had been made for a Jewish poet who later converted to Christianity. I had just inherited my father-in-law’s prized collection of silk neckties. He was a troubled man who had embraced his faith late in life. Those ties became the weft for three works-a handwoven tallit, a woven timeline, and a small keepsake for his widow, which accompanied her to her grave. In that same period, at our local flea market, I noticed a small image in a book depicting an 8th century Buddhist silk Altar Valance from the Silk Road, part of the Stein Collection held by the British Museum. Its row of streamers resembled modern neckties, its precious silk scraps spoke of humility and thrift. It was a communal artifact punctuated by individual prayers. Both the Tallit Katan and the Stein Valance have been carefully researched and documented. I learned much from that material. But, for me, understanding both the making of those pieces and my own absorption inn them required a physical engagement over time. My paper describes this process.

Jüdisch-christliche Volksmedizin in einer Idylle Saul Tschernichowskys

Abstract When working as a country doctor in Czarist Russia, the Jewish author and poet Saul Tschernichowsky (1875-1943) had close contact with the rural population and with the Jews living there. Meeting the village folk and peasants brought back memories of his own childhood spent in the country that made him realize the discrepancy between »yesterday’s world« and modern times. Academic medicine did not count for much in the country. The peasants wanted »proper« drugs, by which they meant drugs whose strong smell and conspicuous colour suggested effectiveness. Some of Tschernichowsky’s medical experiences from that time have found their way into his literary oeuvre, for instance into the stories »be-inyan ha-mumchim« (Concerning experts) and »ze’adim rishonim« (First steps), and particularly also into his idyll »Berele chole« (Berele is sick), composed in 1907, which is an attempt at making this literary genre also fruitful for Modern Hebrew Literature. Analysis of its content reveals that the historiographic inference that Jewish and non-Jewish religious-magic medicine overlap and influence each other is congruent with Tschernichowsky’s poetically alienated description.

Legible lesbian lines: The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz

This article focuses on the poetry of Jewish lesbian poet Irena Klepfisz, written in New York starting in the 1970s. While drawing on the tradition of Yiddish women’s poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, both as scholar and poet, Klepfisz also creates a brand new, bilingual, Yiddish-English poetic mode. By mobilizing both Yiddish and English to voice her poetic and political concerns, Klepfisz stages the English/Yiddish encounter as a site where dominant norms in both languages can be challenged and new possibilities emerge. Exploring both her turn to the past and her bilingual poetry, this article reveals how Klepfisz puts her politics and scholarship to poetic practice and suggests that Klepfisz offers a model of queer translation that undoes the borders between past and present, English and Yiddish, creating a unique mode of Jewish lesbian reclamation and invention.

From Poet to Philosopher (Letter from David Hofstein to Lev Shestov)

The letter of the Jewish poet David Gofshteyn to the philosopher Lev Shestov establishes an intellectual connection between these famous figures of Jewish culture.

“It’s Time You Knew: I’m a Contemporary, Too … ”

This first part of a two-part publication holds four presentations from a roundtable on the poetry and continuing influence of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), with presentations by Mikhail Aizenberg, Vladimir Aristov, Leonid Vidgof and Konstantin Komarov. Aizenberg discusses the rising reputation of Mandelstam in the last three decades of the Soviet era; Aristov raises “problems and lessons” of Mandelstam, often in a transnational literary context; Vidgof addresses what makes Mandelstam “contemporary” to this day, particularly as a Jewish poet; Komarov briefly considers the “dreadful providentialism” of Mandelstam’s writing and the connections of his work to poets who are writing now.

With One Voice: Elements of Acclamation in Early Jewish Liturgical Poetry

AbstractIn this essay, the Rosh Hashanah Shofar service poems by the Jewish poet Yose ben Yose (fourth or fifth century CE, Land of Israel) are read through the lens of the Late Antique practice of acclamation. Yose's surviving body of works is limited, but he was influential within the Jewish tradition, and his poems have long been noted for their use of formal features such as fixed-word repetitions and refrains—features which align not only with poetic norms from the biblical period to Late Antiquity but also with the practice of acclamation. Jews attended (and performed in) the theater and games; they were familiar with rhetorical and oratorical training and related literary norms; and they were integrated socially, commercially, and politically into diverse and varied communities. The affinity of Jewish liturgical poetry from antiquity for other forms of poetic composition reflects Jews’ general embeddedness in Late Ancient culture. Reading Yose's poetry as shaped by the conventions of acclamation highlights how Yose and his congregants were not only distinctly Jewish but also thoroughly Roman.

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and <i>The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature</i>

The Power of Words: The Biblical Abishag in Contemporary American Jewish Women’s Poetry

ABSTRACT 2 Kings 1:1–5, 14 recounts how a young virgin, Abishag the Shunammite, was brought to old King David to warm his cold bones. After the king’s death, Abishag functions as a pawn in Adonijah’s attempt to usurp his brother. Throughout the narrative none of Abishag’s emotions are revealed. Although numerous twentieth-century poets have addressed this biblical theme, I shall focus on those by American Jewish women poets. This approach is based on Hélène Cixous observation that “woman must write woman”—in this case, women poets giving a female figure the voice she is denied in the biblical text. Demonstrating Cixous’ argument that women’s writing and freedom is bound up with their sexuality, they use Abishag to find their way from silence and passivity into independence and sexuality. From Glück’s submissive “Abishag” (1975), the little-known biblical figure develops into an independent woman in charge of her own destiny (B. Holender, 1991; E. A. Sussman-Socolow, 1999; D. Walders, 2005), working her way from a mere “warming device” into a sexy woman who uses her sexuality to tease the king (S. Kaufman, 1984) or dreams of different sexual relations (L. Barrett, 2007), her sexuality being bound up with her independence (S. Skolnik, 2011).

The Production of Alterity: Rosenzweig's Translations of Jehuda Halevi

This article seeks to address the function of alterity in Franz Rosenzweig's book of translations of the poems and hymns of the Jewish medieval philosopher and poet Jehuda Halevi. The article proposes that alongside the alterity that all good translations produce, Rosenzweig's translation of Halevi effected a special kind of temporal cyclical index. In his philosophical work in The Star of Redemption (1921), Rosenzweig identified the role of experiencing the cyclical repetition of the year in the Jewish anticipation of eternity in the present. The article argues that Halevi translations reproduced the very same structures of cyclical repetition, and thus promoted Jewish alterity and eternity.

The Distance between Zurich and Todtnauberg

This paper focuses on two poems written by Paul Celan after first encounters he had with writers who held great significance for him. In 1960 Celan met fellow Jewish poet Nelly Sachs at the Stork Inn in Zurich, and afterwards recorded the event in the poem “Zürich, Zum Storchen”. Seven years later, Celan visited Martin Heidegger at his hut in the German mountains. Celan’s depiction of this encounter is found in the poem “Todtnauberg”. In this essay, I make a two-fold argument regarding the Zurich poem. First I claim that “Todtnauberg” is clearly crafted in light of the earlier Sachs text, a fact that has been overlooked by previous scholarship. As such, it is only in placing the two texts side by side that a complete understanding of “Todtnauberg” comes into view. Second I will indicate how the Zurich poem reflects key elements of an approach to the problem of evil that I term an “enestological theodicy.” Such a term needed to be coined, since this sort of theodicy does not fit in the more traditional narrative categories related to the problem of evil.