Click here to read the rest of the Paul Celan folio. Introduced and translated from the German by Carlie Hoffman(English follows the German, below) For almost 75 years, Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”) has vexed and moved readers. Since my first encounter with the poem in a graduate seminar on the elegy, I’ve noticed how the […]
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This conversation appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Click here to read the rest of the Paul Celan folio. When I first met the poet and translator Pierre Joris as a colleague at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1990s, he was already deep into his engagement with […]
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Over the last several years, debates over antisemitism and Israel/Palestine have roiled the German-speaking world. In 2019, the director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, was forced to resign after the museum tweeted about a petition against the German government’s decision to designate the BDS movement as antisemitic. In the spring of 2020, Germany’s (non-Jewish) […]
Continue ReadingThis review appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Discussed in this essay: The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, by Lila Corwin Berman. Princeton University Press, 2020. 280 pages. IN THE WINTER OF 2018, I found myself in a summer camp in the Santa Monica mountains, learning […]
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In the period immediately following spectacular violence, a poem will often go viral on social media. It makes sense that poetry might offer a way out from that space of unrepresentable trauma—a path back to a social form where the true work of redress can take place. Sometimes, though, the turn to poetry feels both […]
Continue ReadingTWO WEEKS AGO, when fighting ignited across Israel’s so-called “mixed cities” between far-right Jewish vigilantes and groups of mostly young Palestinian men, the city of Lod (in Arabic, Lydda) was the epicenter. After a May 10th demonstration by Palestinian citizens of Israel—who make up roughly a quarter of the city’s population—armed Jewish residents shot and […]
Continue ReadingTHIS WEEK, President Joe Biden met with leaders from five major American Jewish organizations in response to a letter expressing concerns about a “surge in antisemitic attacks,” which the groups connect to popular discourse and protest surrounding Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell announced their intention to introduce a […]
Continue ReadingDiscussed in this essay: The Unreality of Memory, by Elisa Gabbert. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 272 pages. Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, by Ben Ehrenreich. Counterpoint, 2020. 336 pages. Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, by Jessica Hurley. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 301 pages. IT’S […]
Continue ReadingTODAY, the Biden administration committed more than $5 million to rebuilding Gaza after Israeli bombing left swathes of the territory in ruins, with medical facilities, homes, and roads destroyed or damaged by the aerial attack that killed at least 248 people this month. But even as the administration takes steps to aid Gaza, its State […]
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Kayla Ginsburg is a comic artist and all around maker of things. She lives in Chicago with her wife, two cats, and too many art supplies. The post The Haircut appeared first on Jewish Currents.
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