An Open Letter to the Editor of The New York Times Book Review
Israeli poets have provided us with "raw portraits of war," too, writes author Erika Dreifus. Why are their stories less newsworthy than those of Palestinians?
Editor’s Note: I have known author and poet Erika Dreifus for almost a decade now, as our paths have crossed in many contexts. Most recently, we’ve been allies in the fight against antisemitism in the literary community. While I have always been very blunt and loud in my critique of the mainstream literary world, Erika has preferred to stay in the background and attempt to achieve change through quiet diplomacy—writing numerous letters to literary and news publications to present our point of view.
I think she’d be the first to admit that her strategy has met with mixed success, at best. Still, what Erika has achieved is an amazing written record of gaslighting, excuses, broken promises, and outright lies from editors of major publications and other literary curators when it comes to coverage of Jewish issues. Erika has changed her tactics slightly and is going public with more of her previously private conversations.
This open letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review in response to its coverage of Palestinian poets represents a more aggressive strategy. Still, Erika is as thoughtful as ever, and her arguments for fairness in coverage are logical and well-researched. I challenge the NYT’s editors to read and respond to this. Will they? Probably not. But here is the indefatigable Erika Dreifus, anyway, speaking for us all.
TO THE EDITOR:
I write in response to Elisabeth Egan’s “For a Raw Portrait of War, Look to Palestinian Poets,” which The New York Times published online November 22, and which I anticipate will soon appear in a Sunday print-edition of The New York Times Book Review.
With a sub-heading that reads, “In their new collections, Mosab Abu Toha and Najwan Darwish share unvarnished views of destruction, displacement and loss,” Egan’s piece is part-dual review, part-dual profile, featuring excerpted work and quotations from both poets. The piece also spotlights Palestinian-American writers Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who, as Egan notes, “were finalists for the National Book Award for poetry; on November 20, Tuffaha won the award.” (Egan then briefly cites Tuffaha’s acceptance speech.)
Throughout, Egan writes with exquisite empathy and compassion. She approaches her project by casting the works as a current manifestation of “a long tradition of poetry about war”: “Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian poets have fueled a literary revival. A new documentary, ‘After: Poetry Destroys Silence,’ shows writers’ responses to the Holocaust and argues for the importance of the form in addressing trauma.”
Egan continues by citing the well-known—and, although she doesn’t provide him with the same descriptive labels she offers for the Palestinian and Palestinian-American writers in her piece, perhaps not-incidentally-Jewish-American—poet Edward Hirsch, who affirms “this approach” as well as its testimonial value: “In Tuffaha’s and Joudah’s work, and in collections by Abu Toha and Darwish, Hirsch said, ‘there’s an element of witness.’”
On the surface, there is nothing objectionable about any of this.
But let’s look beneath the surface.
Reading between the lines, one might find an implied, and highly problematic, analogy between Palestinians and those victimized by Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler. One might also infer that insofar as Jewish writing is concerned, it’s necessary to look back some eight decades, to the Holocaust, to find examples of trauma-infused work. Or, to put it another way—that since 1945, Jews have experienced literally no “destruction, displacement, or loss” that their poetry, too, might witness.
If only.
Of course, the most cataclysmic event to strike the Jewish people in recent times is what Egan compresses into a single, non-detailed reference to “Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.” In fact, since that date, Israeli poets have provided us with “raw portraits of war,” too.
But one would not know this from Egan’s work—or from The New York Times Book Review or other prominent literary sources more generally. Which makes another element of the piece, in which Egan argues that the works by Darwish and Abu Toha “grapple with a sense of erasure,” both notable and ironic.
It is true that it takes more effort to locate current Israeli- and Jewish-authored war poetry—which is one reason to expect highly-visible, better-resourced outlets such as The New York Times Book Review to do so. Eminent American publishers are not rushing to publish collections by Israeli poets; mainstream magazines and newspapers are not interviewing or otherwise profiling them; they are not being nominated for (let alone winning) prestigious prizes.
Quite the contrary. Whether through amply-publicized boycott campaigns or what the British-Jewish journalist Jonathan Freedland has recently characterized in another context as “stealth” silencing efforts, their voices are being suppressed.1 This omission renders readers’ collective understanding of the current conflict deeply one-sided and compromised.
To assist anyone at The New York Times Book Review—or anywhere else—in identifying the latest contributions of Israeli and other Jewish poets to the “long tradition of poetry about war,” I’ll offer just a few “starter-pack” suggestions.
And since we are, right now, observing Jewish Book Month, there truly is no time like the present to delve into them.
One might begin by consulting the “Witnessing” project that the Jewish Book Council (JBC) launched October 10, 2023. As the JBC routinely describes it, the series:
shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
It is critical to understand history not just through the books that will be written later, but also through the first-hand testimonies and real-time accounting of events as they occur. At Jewish Book Council, we understand the value of these written testimonials and of sharing these individual experiences. It’s more important now than ever to give space to these voices and narratives.
Many of the pieces in the series are poems; they’re labeled as such. (Disclosure: My own “Words Are All that I Have: A Found Poem” has been published in this series.)
Another suggestion: Right here at Judith magazine, poetry editor (and American-Israeli) Rachel Neve-Midbar recently curated a powerful portfolio: “Finally, Finally, FINALLY You Are Free: A Tribute in Poetry to Hersh Polin-Goldberg (z"l) and His Family.” To quote Neve-Midbar’s introductory text:
Here I offer you twelve poems written by Jews across the religious spectrum and from around the world. There is love and anger in these poems. There is grief. There are prayers, for Hersh, for his family, for all of us. I hope these poems ease the ache we all feel at the losses the Jews have sustained, at the losses the Palestinians have sustained, at the way instability in Israel/Palestine brings instability to people everywhere. In Rachel [Goldberg]’s words: we need to do better.
As for print volumes, one notable recent release—featured by a number of Jewish outlets although overlooked elsewhere—is Shiva שבעה: Poems of October 7, a bilingual anthology edited and translated by the Israel-based team of Rachel Korazim, Michael Bohnen, and Heather Silverman. As the jacket copy explains:
In the months following the horrors of October 7th, Israelis wrote poems to express the nation’s feelings and emotions. Well-known poets alongside new fresh voices appeared daily on social media and in the literary supplements of daily papers. They described the inability to speak; they gave voice to choked tears, rage and despair. This anthology includes 59 Hebrew poems printed alongside their English translations. Net proceeds of all sales will be donated to the Israel Trauma Coalition for their work with victims of October 7th and its aftermath.
Moreover, for those who cannot access Hebrew directly, the English-language Israeli press—if one chooses to follow it—provides considerable arts-related coverage. For example, on the specific intersection of poetry and “displacement,” by reading The Times of Israel Egan and others might have encountered Jessica Steinberg’s “Poetry Festival Moves from Evacuated Border Town to Metula” or “At Festival Displaced by War, Poets Reflect on Post-Oct. 7 Work”.
They might also have read Steinberg’s August 1 report on a privately published chapbook dedicated to the memory of Judih Weinstein Haggai,
the Kibbutz Nir Oz resident who was murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7 along with her husband, Gadi Haggai, as they took their regular early morning walk, was many things, including wife, mother, teacher, puppeteer and poet.
Born in upstate New York but raised in Canada, Weinstein, 70, moved to Israel as a young adult and lived in Israel for decades.
She had long been a member of the southern branch of Voices Israel, a group of English-language poets that meets monthly.
Weinstein was well known for her haikus, the short poems she wrote throughout much of her adult life.
Titled Light Thru Trees, the chapbook “highlights Weinstein’s poetry and offers an opportunity for her fellow poets to memorialize her,” even as her body, and her husband’s, continue to be held hostage in Gaza.
I am not arguing for less attention to Palestinian poets and their war-related work, even as I may sometimes object to how various writers, editors, and other curators choose to frame it.2 What I am arguing for is some acknowledgment in literary spaces that Israeli and Jewish poets and writers—beyond that vocal tokenizing minority who literally co-sign the boycott statements and seek to silence the rest of us—have perspectives to impart, too.
Erika Dreifus is the author of Birthright: Poems and Quiet Americans: Stories, which was named an American Library Association/Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. An active Jewish literary consultant and advocate, Erika teaches at Baruch College/CUNY; serves on the boards of The Artists Against Antisemitism and the Leo Baeck Institute; and is a Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute fellow. For more than 20 years, she has published The Practicing Writer (re-branded as The Practicing Writer 2.0 once Erika transferred it to Substack), a free and popular newsletter for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Find her online at ErikaDreifus.com and, most recently, on Bluesky.
Five tiny delights
The moment I can sense that the morning coffee is starting to kick-start my brain.
Any good streaming comedy. (Favorite-show reruns work, too.)
The sight, smell, and/or sound of the ocean.
Those videos/reels of young children meeting their new baby siblings.
Completing a draft. Of anything.
Five tiny Jewish delights
Walking into the synagogue my parents, sister, and I joined 45+ years ago.
Winter sunlight streaming through the living-room window as, beneath a warm blanket, I fall into a Shabbat nap on a cold Saturday afternoon.
The memory of baking berches with my German-Jewish-born grandfather (whose family ran a bakery in their Black Forest village for generations).
Supplying my Hebrew name when I place an order at Aroma (or elsewhere) in Israel—and then hearing myself summoned to the counter as “יוכבד” instead of “Erika.”
This performance of Debbie Friedman (z”l)’s arrangement of “Oseh Shalom.”
I’ve queued up the YouTube recording of Freedland’s discussion of this matter with Yonit Levi, his Unholy podcast co-host.
For examples, consult “On What Poets & Writers Erases—and What It Amplifies”; “On AWP, Zionism, and Israel”; and various items within “After October 7: Readings, Recordings and More” (particularly the section “Regarding Literary and Literary-Adjacent Communities”) and “Writers, Beware.”
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Bravo, Erika. I am grateful for all that you do.
Thank you Erica! I advise all to subscribe to Erica's remarkable work. And buy Birthright. Voices Israel an international group for Jewish writers writing in the English language is one I also recommend. As a guest contest judge, I read some remarkable work revealing the impact of October 7 and the loss of family members. I hope they publish an anthology.
Nancy Shiffrin https://www,NancyShiffrin.net