A crucial question for the study of Jewishness is the relationship between identity and environment. Diaspora, scattering, conventionally refers to a “group of people who have … become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin” (OED).[1]] In other words, diasporic identity locates itself in the experience of living the difference between the present “host” place and the point of origin, the “mother” place, which is geographically and temporally absent. We find this theme also in feminist discourse, for instance in Alicia Ostriker’s unanswered question, “Does there exist, as a subterranean current below the surface structure of male-oriented language, a specifically female language, a ‘mother tongue’?” (69-70).[2]
In this paper, which I presented at a symposium in 2025,[3] I attempt to engage Jewishness and gender through a consideration of environment, not in terms of homeland or lost point of origin (mother land, mother tongue), but in terms of passage itself: the wilderness. As I will argue, wilderness is precisely that which cannot be claimed as a lost point of origin. It is the place of torment and suffering and movement, unlivable to the point of belonging to no one. It is in the writing of this unclaimable space that the self-referential ipseity of identity can open out onto that which it conventionally excludes.
* * *
I want to talk about Muriel Rukeyser’s poetics of the wilderness. Introducing Rukeyser can sometimes be hard because there are still many people to whom she’s not well known and her work is quite hard to taxonomize. Unproblematically, we can say she was a poet, a woman, an American, and a Jew (I should add secular Jew), which is how she described herself in 1944 at the “Under Forty: Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” (34);[4] and also how Adrienne Rich memorialized her in 1990 in the first issue of the Jewish feminist journal Bridges (23).[5]
I’m going to talk about Rukeyser as a writer of Jewish identity and as a writer of woman identity. Something quite prescient and generous about her poetics is her refusal to ground these identities in a recognizable essence. She wrote as a woman and as a Jew without making it clear what she meant by those terms. In a 1968 lecture on Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Rukeyser remarked on the inclusion of her 1944 sonnet “To Be a Jew In The Twentieth Century” in a British edition of Jewish prayers, saying, “I thought of Jews and the Jewish people as not perhaps a thing you can say anything about, in a way” (262).[6] We see this refusal to say anything about Jews in the poem itself:
To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.[7]
Rather than tying Jewish identity to its associations with tradition, heritage, religion, custom or any other positive element, Rukeyser identifies Jewishness as the gift of “torment.“ Jewish identity is no more and no less than a gesture of resistance which defies power for the sake of “suffering to be free, / Daring to live for the impossible.” Charlotte Mandel has already teased out this complicity within Rukeyser’s identities as a poet and as a Jew in her reading of Rukeyser’s “Akiba Inheritance”: the legend of her descent from Rabbi Akiba, the 2nd century rabbi and biblical scholar who recited the Shema prayer in defiance as he was tortured to death by the Romans. For Mandel, the link lies precisely in this gesture or gift: “Writing poetry is the form of ‘torment’ that can fulfill the self; this pattern continues throughout her lifetime.”[8] I will return to Akiba, but, as I shall argue, in Rukeyser’s poems, there is nothing especially Jewish about this gift of torment. We find it everywhere, associated with anyone who refuses to be invisible.
The gift of torment does not, cannot, belong to anyone in the same way we conventionally understand an identity to belong to the identified: my identity, the ipseity of myself, belonging to me and only me. And, critically, the gesture involves the element of choice, of agency. The gift can be refused or accepted. And it’s this element of choice, linking the unchosen circumstances of birth to a gesture of resistance, that enables Rukeyser to say in her address to the Under Forty symposium: “if one is free, freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestors, to go on with their wishes and their fight” (34).[9]
To whom does the gift of torment properly belong? In his poem, “The Hoopoe,” Mahmoud Darwish wrote,
There is nothing left of us in the wilderness
save what the wilderness kept for itself:
a skin’s tatters on the thorn, a warrior’s song for his homeland,
and a mouth of emptiness.[10]
To whom, then, does the gift of torment belong? Rukeyser gives this collectivity many names. In her “Orpheus” sequence, they are “The faceless and the unborn” (294).[11] In the “Akiba” sequence, which I’ll turn to shortly, she addresses them as “All those who together are the frontier.”[12] But usually when Rukeyser invokes this collectivity, it is in the form of a catalogue or a list, a heterogeneous multitude which evades nomination. From the very beginning of her career, working as a journalist, Rukeyser saw the role of the poet as that of a witness to this multitude. This address to an unqualifiable collective is a generative paradox within Rukeyser’s poetic, thoroughly bound up in the documentarian, witnessing impulse; the address differs from the inclusive “We,” which would lay claim to alterity under the banner of, say, a shared humanity. One assumes responsibility as oneself: this is what is “generative,” as Catherine Gander suggests in her reading of “Worlds Alongside”: “Rukeyser theorizes that ‘work’ may be ‘done on the self’ via the assumption of ‘responsibility’ for something outside the self” (44).[13]
But, even so, as Gander suggests, ”[w]hilst she avoids speaking for the other, the imagination governing [“Worlds Alongside”] represents the other as a poetic image” (49). Always an effort to move out to an Other, bound with the risk of representing suffering as an image, making it available for an illegitimate claim to alterity. More recently, Vivian Pollack has wrestled with the vagueness of this address in “The Book of the Dead”:
“These are the roads to take when you think of your country.”
Your country? To whom is Rukeyser speaking? Is she speaking to Vassar grads […]; or is she speaking to miners’ wives like Emma Jones, who lost three sons, including her youngest, Shirley, aged seventeen, who said, “Mother, I cannot get my breath”? (609)[14]
Pollack attributes the form of this address in Rukeyser to the “bad influence” of Whitman, a way out of a closed conception of Jewish identity that could not co-exist with the poetic self: “Whitman fortified her in her youth as she struggled with a past that began in her flight from a bourgeois Jewish family” (609).
Out of the bourgeois Jewish family into what? In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser writes, “On work gangs, prison gangs, in the nightclubs, on the ships and docks, our songs arise” (90). [15] For Rukeyser, the source of poetry is this buried music. ”Buried,” she says, “in that it never touches its full audience.” The obligation of the poet as witness to this collectivity which exceeds nomination is what grounds the writing of Jewish identity as “not perhaps a thing you can say anything about.” In her 1968 lecture, speaking about her sonnet, “To be a Jew in the 20th century,” Rukeyser said,
[T]hey have used a sonnet of mine in this Prayer Book, and it is so strange to see this, you know, unsigned, assimilated, absorbed into the body of poetry, in a way. And it is what one hopes for in general for the best of anything one can do—that it simply be taken into the body of poetry. (262)[16]
Rukeyser’s approach to gynocentrism runs in parallel. Rukeyser once said, pointedly, to Cynthia Ozick, “I write from the body, a female body” (130). [17] She was not interested in the idea of a gender-neutral writing. But Rukeyser also wasn’t interested in defining a female subjectivity in opposition to a male subjectivity. In 1982, Alicia Ostriker gave us this definition of feminist revisionist myth-making: “In all these cases the poet simultaneously deconstructs a prior ‘myth’ or ‘story’ and constructs a new one which includes, instead of excluding, herself” (72). [18] Rukeyser frequently fails to do this and the “Akiba” sequence is an example of this supposed “failure.” Her feminist revisionist project is not based on resituating the contemporary female poetic subjectivity within the canonical text. The value of tradition will be the possibility of using it to reach a place where experience can be shared.
For Rukeyser, woman identity, like Jewish identity, is a way in, a witnessing perspective that opens onto the collectivity of the buried exceeding all nomination. Identity is necessary here, but always as a means of reaching what exceeds it. In Rukeyser’s poetic, the poet is called to witness the other as themself and the imaginative effort of poetry is built around this fact. But this self is not the ipseity of a single self I would possess; it is many identifications put to work through the poetic, in a movement toward another, with a prayer to be transformed. Shira Wolosky has referred to this structure as “mutual figuration”:
Rukeyser’s poetic offers her both method and model of negotiating her different identities. It is in poetic terms that her different identifications become figures for each other, standing for and also with or against each other. Such mutual figuration itself deeply defines Rukeyser’s poetic. (202)[19]
I would argue that the negotiation of Rukeyser’s different identities in her poetic depends as much on a negotiation of identities not her own. When asked about Rilke’s comment in his Letters to a Young Poet that “There is only one single way. Go into yourself,” Rukeyser responded, saying, “The going into oneself is a curious relation with something else. If you dive deep enough and have favorable winds or whatever is under the water, you come to a place where experience can be shared” (120).[20]
***
I’m now going to move to the poem sequence “Akiba.”[21] Akiba was a 2nd century rabbi and biblical scholar who introduced the Song of Songs, the great biblical poem of desire, into the canon of Hebrew Scripture and recited the Shema as he was tortured to death.[22] Rukeyser leaves us a note with this poem: “The story in my mother’s family is that we are descended from Akiba—unverifiable, but a great gift to a child” (53).[23] An unverifiable gift.
The poem begins, “The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, / with signs, and his journeys” (454). From where do our songs arise? Nocturnal signs and journeys, prison gangs and docks. How are we going to read these signs? Jewish myth, is one way in: “seeds of beginning, / Given from darkness and remembering darkness.” Another way in is gynocentrism: “Acknowledging opened water, possibility: / open like a woman to this meaning.”
Throughout the sequence, Rukeyser returns to two parables. The first parable is Moses drawing water from the rock in the Sinai desert and the second is Akiba noticing how drops of water at a spring can deform the rock they fall on and deciding to take up rabbinical study. She starts with Exodus, Passover:
Where the rock is split
and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud;
the red splatter, abstraction, on the door
speaks to the angel and the constellations.
The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.
We’ll focus on the rock-water dyad here and read for gender. After God parts the Red Sea and the sand speaks to the noon, the Israelites turn on Moses: “Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness, that we should die here?” In response Moses strikes a stone and draws water from it. Moses the patriarch, we might say, draws feminine sustenance from masculine hardness. But then Rukeyser moves back to
Music of one child carried into the desert;
firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
Now Rukeyser shows us Moses the patriarch as a baby, left by the banks of the Nile, drawn through the water by women, “water-drawn” people, the women who serve Pharaoh’s daughter. If Moses is the rock from which water is drawn, he has already been the water drawn from the rock. And isn’t drawing water the work of the “water-drawn people”? When Moses strikes the stone, it is the same miracle which returns in a new form, with Moses appearing under a different gendered sign. The miracle recurs within a chain of speaking signs (water, rock, fire…) operating independently from stable gendered subjects. It is in relation to this chain that symbolic gendering fluctuates on the side of subjectivity. From this side, it is the miracle of the patriarch who saves the assembly of the Lord in the desert by assuming the role of a female servant, having been saved himself in the desert by a female servant. Or, it is water speaking to rock and rock to water. When we attend to the night covered in signs, we don’t find gendered subjectivities. Instead we find “The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.”
The meaning of a sign is not contained in itself as a referent but emerges relationally in this act of speaking, in the movement out to another. This relational ontology of speaking signs brings with it a retroactive temporality in which origins do not foretell, but become originary by being chosen in the present:
This is not the past walking into the future,
the walk is painful, into the present, the dance
not visible as dance until much later.
The meaning of Akiba does not lie in the past, but in the movement into the present: choosing him as an ancestor.[24]
The passage through wilderness brings Moses through mythic territories in which symbolic genders fluctuate. This happens with Akiba and his wife Rachel also. One significant difference between Rukeyser’s poem and other iterations of the legend is that Rukeyser substitutes Rachel’s body for the Torah itself in the parable of the spring. Chabad.org gives us a version in which Akiba asks himself (with Rachel standing by to affirm him), “Suppose I began to study the Torah, little by little, drop by drop. Do you think my stony heart would soften up?”[25]
Rukeyser gives this to us as, “The body of Rachel says, the marriage says, / The eyes of Rachel say, and water upon rock / Cutting its groove all year says All things learn” (457). It is Rachel who cuts her groove into Akiba as “opened water,” her body as buried song taking the place of scripture. As water speaks to rock, “In the huge wordless shepherd she finds Akiba.” The reversibility of gendered dualisms engenders the coming to language of buried song. We see this in lines such as: “The woman in her dreams / And the man answering” (456). Rukeyser seizes upon the conventional gendered dualism of female irrationality and authorizing male speech while destabilizing the hierarchical associations of spirit/matter, activity/passivity: Rachel dreams and Akiba answers her dreams. By this act of speaking, she finds in him “the shepherd of dreams.” In positioning Rachel as the “author” of Akiba, the one whose liquid openness impresses itself upon his stony wordlessness, Rukeyser forges an identification between the parable of the spring and the legend of Akiba introducing the Song of Songs into the biblical canon and thereby giving sexuality a place within Jewish religious discourse, bringing buried “holy desire” to scripture: it is Rachel, who becomes, at a remove, the author of the Song of Songs.
Yet, as Amy Kalmanofsky cautions, “biblical stories … that overtly play with gender norms do not reject the gender dichotomy functioning within patriarchy. They work to strengthen it.”[26] Moses’ and Akiba’s miracles here are the same: the appropriation of a gendered power by the patronymic through play. To be the man who “impossibly” flows or the man who “impossibly” draws water, “impossibly” because he remains all rock. But when Rukeyser strips narrative back to these nocturnal signs, she discovers an element of choice in the reception of a gift. Percy Bysse Shelley reminds us that the patronymic weathers in the wilderness: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert….”[27] Something else makes its way through sometimes. What’s critical is that the queering of gendered dualisms is made possible through the wilderness journey. Rukeyser alludes to this in the section titled “For the Song of Songs”:
However the voices rise
They are the shepherd, the king,
The woman; dreams,
Holy desire.
…
If none remember
Who is lover, who the beloved,
Whether the poet be
Woman or man,The desire will make
A way through the wilderness (465)
With respect to holy desire, the buried music, we are not gendered subjects (shepherd, king, woman, etc.): “We are the rock acknowledging water, and water / Fire, and woman man, all brought through wilderness” (458). This is a gynocentric writing which does not depend on defining gendered subjectivities. It’s not about reconstructing myth around the feminist subject, as Ostriker suggested. Instead, Rukeyser strips myth back to its signs, finding that connection to the wilderness where male and female are bound together in their speaking: “All the opposites, all in the dialogue” (459).
This is also a Jewish writing that does not depend on defining Jewish subjectivities. As long as desire makes its way through the wilderness. Because when we come back to the story itself, the night covered in signs, we find it’s not the story of women or the Jewish people at all. It’s the story of “The wilderness journey through which we move” (455) and it belongs to
the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:
an army who came to the ocean: the walkers
who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,
city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,
the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,
swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris
and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:
all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.
Notes
[1] ‘Diaspora’, in Oxford English Dictionary [online], <https://www.oed.com/dictionary/diaspora> [Accessed 24/01/26].
[2] Alicia Ostriker, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Signs, vol. 8, no.1, 1982, pp. 68-90.
[3] This paper was originally delivered at the (Un)Habit Symposium, organized by Dominic Gilani at the University of Bristol in June 2025. The symposium brought together early career researchers working across different areas of the humanities to talk about habitability and environments on a scorching day in a poorly ventilated room. Elsewhere, war was and is being waged, not on armies or even nations, but on environments themselves, on the very possibility of survival in a particular place.
[4] Rukeyser, Muriel, “Author’s Introduction.” The Muriel Rukeyser Era, edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Cornell University Press, 2023, pp. 30-35.
[5] Rich, Adrienne, “Muriel Rukeyser, 1913-1978: ‘Poet…Woman…American…Jew.’” Bridges, vol. 1, no.1, 1990, pp. 23-29.
[6] Rukeyser, Muriel, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact.” The Rukeyser Era, pp. 252-266.
[7] Rukeyser, Muriel, “To be a Jew in the twentieth century.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog with Jan Heller Levi, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, p. 243.
[8] Charlotte Mandel, ‘Muriel Rukeyser’s Rabbi Akiba Inheritance’ (2015), Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive <https://murielrukeyser.org/2015/05/03/charlotte-mandel-muriel-rukeysers-rabbi-akiba-inheritance/> [Accessed 24/01/26].
[9] “Author’s Introduction.” The Muriel Rukeyser Era, edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Cornell University Press, 2023, pp. 30-35.
[10] Mahmoud Darwish, “The Hoopoe.” Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, University of California Press, 2003, p. 32.
[11] “Orpheus.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006, pp. 287-296.
[12] “Akiba.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, pp. 454-460.
[13] Catherine Gander, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
[14] Vivian Pollak, “Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser Among the Jews.” The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 606-626.
[15] Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry. Paris Press, 1996.
[16] Rukeyser, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact.” The Rukeyser Era, pp. 252-266.
[17] Quoted in Lorrie Goldensohn, “Our Mother Muriel.” How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 121-134.
[18] Alicia Ostriker, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking.” Signs, vol. 8, no.1, 1982, pp. 68-90.
[19] Shira Wolosky, “What Do Jews Stand For? Muriel Rukeyser’s Ethics of Identity,” Nashim, no. 19, 2010, pp. 199-226.
[20] “Muriel Rukeyser.” The Poet’s Craft: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, edited by William Packard, Paragon, 1987, pp. 116-136.
[21] Rukeyser, “Akiba,” Collected Poems, pp. 454-460.
[22] For Rukeyser, these two facts are especially significant in relation to each other. In the section of “Akiba” titled “Akiba Martyr” she describes “The look of delight of the martyr / Among the colors of pain” (459). In the section titled “For the Song of Songs,” to which I return later, this “delight” returns in the possibility of tradition as renewal enabled by death and loss of identity incurred in the wilderness: “In these delights / Is eternity of seed.” (457)
[23] Janet Kaufman, “’But not the study.’” How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, pp. 45-62.
[24] Relational ontology and retroactive temporality are thoroughly co-implicated with agency in Rukeyser’s poetic. Critics such as Kaufman have suggested that Rukeyser’s claim to be descended from Akiba depends on a myth of blood relation, however it is not clear that Rukeyser’s metaphysics support this (Kaufman 52). The meaning of the claim lies in the element of choice, not Rukeyser’s Jewishness. It is still meaningful to ask, for instance, whether Harriet Tubman owes Moses a debt for her name, or whether Moses owes Tubman a debt for his.
[25] ‘Rabbi Akiva: His Life and Teachings’, chabad.org, <https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112059/jewish/Rabbi-Akiva-His-Life-and-Teachings.htm> [Accessed 26/10/25] (para. 3 of 10).
[26] Amy Kalmanofsky, Gender-play in the Hebrew Bible. Routledge, 2017, p. 3.
[27] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias> [Accessed 26/10/25].
© Kat Graff, 2025
To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Kat Graff, ” Wilderness Journeys: 6/19/25.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, https://murielrukeyser.org/2026/02/28/kat-graff-wilderness-journeys-6-19-25/
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