For ten years Dory Manor lived in Paris and wrote poetry in Hebrew. Early on in his stay in France he debated trying to shift into French, but soon realized that poetry—as opposed to other sorts of writing—was an art he could perform only in his mother tongue, Hebrew. This is not surprising: as opposed to authors and playwrights, very few modern poets have written in an acquired language. Even poets who were immigrants and exiles generally clung to their mother tongues. The German-language poet, Paul Celan, took it a step further and asserted that, “Only in the mother tongue can one speak...
Beginning in September 1941 and throughout the war, Central Asia and Iran became places of refuge to hundreds of thousand of Jewish and Catholic Polish citizens. Mikhal Dekel, whose father was a child refugee in Tehran, will recount the research and writing process of this epic yet relatively unknown Holocaust story, told in her new book Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey...
How can an ancient religious ritual convey current social and political needs? This question emerged from eight years (2007-2015) of documentation of Sukkot, the Jewish festival that annually commemorates the Israelites’ Biblical journey through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land. This talk explores the holiday’s central rite of building and “...
At some time after end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple. But its earliest effects can be traced...
Tomer Persico (UC Berkeley Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies; Tel-Aviv University)