Beneath a Pile of Tulle and Tiaras: Talking with Devorah Blachor
I was hunting around for my copy of Devorah Blachor’s new book, The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess: How to Raise a Girl Who’s Authentic, Joyful, and Fearless—Even if She Refuses to Wear...
View ArticleThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe...
View ArticleDeath and Rebirth: Armenians in Jerusalem
Artist Vic Lepejian sketched a ripe pomegranate onto an unburnished vase when my husband David and I entered the doorway of his art studio located on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa—the street where Jesus is...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #96: Voices of Displacement
A-Wa is a vocal ensemble, a band, a dream, an elegy, a small mobile collective of rhapsodes, three sisters of Yemenite Jewish origin, singing primarily in Arabic. The sisters are Tair Haim, who is the...
View ArticleKeeping Yiddish Alive: A Conversation with Josh Lambert
If you live in America, chances are you know some Yiddish—even if you think you don’t. You know it if you’ve eaten a bagel or a matzo ball, if you’ve ever said shmuck or schmo or glitch or shlep. My...
View ArticleWhen the Healing Place Exploded
“I am good. Ana mnih. ANA MNIH. MAMA. ANA MNIH. KHALTOU. ANA MNIH.” These are the messages my brother-in-law, Rami, sent on the family Whatsapp group between 6:08 p.m. and 6:09 p.m. Beirut time, right...
View ArticleThe Sound of Beginning: Birthright by George Abraham
There are many ways to begin a collection of poems, from startling lyricism to pointed symbolic gestures encompassing a mission statement. George Abraham begins Birthright without any such gesture,...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: David Biespiel
Poet, critic, and memoirist David Biespiel and I both grew up in Meyerland, the main Jewish enclave in Houston. (Yes, there are Jews in Texas, even though both of us left.) We lived in low-slung brick...
View ArticleFinding Home in a Cult’s Aftermath: Talking with Ronit Plank
Like many others, I was entranced by the premiere of Wild Wild Country, the hit Netflix docuseries that follows the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh from India to rural Oregon and the cultural battle...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Aruni Kashyap
I bought Aruni Kashyap’s collection There Is No Good Time for Bad News because the title put words to the experience of living through 2020. The near-constant state of anxiety, of living in the...
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