This week for the LABA Journal, Jacob Siegel, writer and combat veteran, reflects on the books that inspired him. No matter how much time has passed it happens inevitably that I feel a tap on the shoulder and something pulls me back towards war. Books offer no escape from that pull. It doesn’t matter that
There are a lot of different ways of thinking about Hanukkah, but we tend to forget that the holiday is very much about intra-Jewish conflict. The Festival of Lights, as you know, commemorates the restoration of the Temple in 164 BCE. After kicking out the Seleucids — whom we might call today “culturally Greek Syrians”
Happy Thanksgiving from LABA, the international incubator of Jewish arts and culture! Today, on the American holiday dedicated to fressing (aka gluttony), we’d like to share some words of wisdom about stuffing yourself. You may know that the great Moses Ben Maimon, or Maimonides, was renowned both as a rabbi and a doctor, and his
SHIBBOLET Tova Shvartzman for LABA Journal At this very moment I have a concrete experience of the Other. This current Other is the English language. It is not a friendly Other like a neighbor. It is an alien Other. I need to express myself in this foreign tongue to establish connections between creativity and work with you all here today. In
“THE NEXT FOUR YEARS” by Joshua Max Feldman Joshua Max Feldman, a New York-based author, is a 2015-2016 LABA alumnus. His new novel, If I Knew the Way, will be available in fall, 2017, from William Morrow. His novel The Book of Jonah is currently available in paperback. Here, on the eve of the 58th
LABA Journal’s Editor Hanan Elstein: Should We Discuss OTHER? OTHER is a highly explosive theme, especially beyond its limited political scope and current obvious relevance. The notion of the Other, be it phenomenological, existential or psychological, is inherently elusive and resists a single coherent definition. Thinkers as well as artists, in fact human beings by
A modest offering for a woman who had just lost everything. BY LITAL DOTAN A profoundly disturbing LABA session discussing the behavioral rules in a state of war and battle, specifically behavior with captive women, instigated my interrogation into the route of the captive towards her new identity. A WOMAN OF A GOODLY FORM is she who is
BY JOSHUA MAX FELDMAN The act of naming is a primary human activity. In the first moments of Genesis, God creates, and Adam names: the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Even before the appearance of Eve, before humanity
BY GAL BECKERMAN I don’t have a son and so I feel spared King David’s lament for Absalom, calling out the name of his dead child not only because of the loss — though this would be enough — but because, with Absalom’s death, the purest projection of himself has been erased from the world. This came
BY JESSICA GROSS Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life begins as a classic coming-of-age tale: four young men, college friends, navigate their way in the world. But slowly (over the course of 700-plus pages), the novel narrows into the story of Jude. A beautiful boy, he suffers a litany of vile abuses, beginning with serial rape