October Words
By Eve Grubin – I try to speak slant or bright. My words meet triangles of fire, thrown. Meanings I make disintegrate. I try to speak slant or bright. If I say… pogrom, the turning begins… I become mute. I must not say, I cannot name… So many words can’t be said. No matter what, […]
Miklat
By Vered Tohar – Blessed is my Bubbe Golda Katzikal May her Memory be for a blessing No longer with us But always with me Not seeing Jewish children Hiding In closets Again. Vered Tohar is professor in the Department of the Literature of the Jewish People at Bar Ilan University Translated from the Hebrew […]
No Shelter
By Noa Offek – I don’t believe in statistics. Let me rephrase — I have too much respect for potential scenarios to accept the flattened statistical version presented to the masses in goodwill and with a reassuring smile. My grandparents have thirty seconds to get to a shelter when the siren goes off. But statistics […]
Helter Shelter
By Mendel Horowitz – My grandparents had their silence, Noah had his ark. My neighbors have their refuge On the second floor. With blast doors, First aid kits and Psalms, Rechargeable batteries, water, And emergency lights. I have mostly these words On this paper, And explosive music In my head. Some tempos pulsate More soundly; […]
Life Sentence
By Roy Atadgy – I’m known to hide in sentences. Living between punctuation, Rubix-cubing words, interrogating them, inspecting them obsessively––this is my ultimate comfort. When it comes to sentences, to the battleground of sentences (in which words are disordered soldiers), deciphering its perfect architecture, ordering the disorder, is not only where I find comfort, but […]
Shelter in Place
By Batnadiv HaKarmi – May the Place console you amongst the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem – Traditional Jewish blessing to mourners Hamakom yenahem — may the Place console, may your room be a comfort, may your house embrace; may you shelter in her arms, may she kiss your face. For behold there is […]
Pikachu Jew
By Erica Landis – I once dressed up as a giant yellow Pikachu. I was newly in crush with my now husband and he needed someone to wear this rented costume outside the video game store he managed. “I’ll do it!” I said. “You will?” he said. “Sure, why not?” I said. “But you don’t […]
Gimme Shelter
By Maya Sela – Host of ‘מה שכרוך’ (Ma She’karuch) on KAN Radio (Original Hebrew text below – הטקסט המקורי בעברית מופיע בהמשך) Maybe I’ve lost my mind. I have no desire for a foreign passport, and I don’t want to escape. On October 7th, I sat alone in my apartment in Tel Aviv and […]
Mezuzah
By Shelly Butcher – For months I’d been putting off placing a mezuzah on the front door of my apartment in the sleepy little community where I live in the South Bay of San Francisco. My apartment got flooded in February. Who knew that small toilet tank parts could get corroded and break clear off? […]
October 7 Made Me a Driver
Lahav Harkov – I got my driver’s license at age 35. I put it off and delayed and deferred it until finally I couldn’t anymore: The only way I could afford to own a home was to live in new construction, in a new neighborhood, with very little public transportation and no shops or schools […]
