Akiba

Kat Graff, Wilderness Journeys: 6/19/25

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, [...]

2026-02-28T18:28:37+00:00February 28, 2026|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Charlotte Mandel: Muriel Rukeyser’s Rabbi Akiba Inheritance

Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry allows no canonical containment. She was born in New York Cityin 1913 and died in that city on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1980. Her lifetime encompasses both World Wars, the Great Depression, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War. “Whatever can come to a woman can come to me,” stated her poem “Waterlily Fire” in 1962 (Collected Poems 309). Her appetite for experience was omnivorous: Modernism came to her--as did Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, the movies, Karl Marx, the daily violence in newspapers. Had H.D., Pound or Williams not preceded her, she nonetheless would have understood [...]

2026-03-19T14:38:16+00:00May 3, 2015|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments
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