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Paideuma
(The National Poetry Foundation)
OCTOBER
2019
Poetry in the 21st Century and Radical Faith
The story is well-known: on a forced march from a labor camp in eastern Serbia toward northwest Hungary in October 1944, Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti continues to jot down poems in a small exercise book he carries with him.
The Stronach Memorial
Lecture on the
Teaching of Poetry
MAY
2016
"This Bequest of Wings": On Teaching Poetry in a Region of Conflict
Rachel Tzvia Back delivers the Twelfth Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture at the University of Berkeley in California. Her address considers the usefulness of poetry as a bridging element in a classroom of students divided by the conflict of their region. Chana Bloch introduces Rachel.
World Literature Today
MAY-AUGUST 2014
"A Species of Magic": The Role of Poetry in Protest and Truth-telling
Israeli poetry of protest is a relatively new phenomenon, even as it emanates from an ancient Jewish tradition of debate and dissent. Rachel Tzvia Back considers the power of poetry in general, and in her region specifically, to protest and speak difficult truths in the face of ongoing conflict and lies.
Marginalia / LARB
SEPTEMBER 2020
The Interim World: The Poetics of Tuvia Ruebner
Rachel Tzvia Back discusses the poetics of Tuvia Ruebner as viewed through the prism of translation theory and practice. The essay discusses the various ways Ruebner's poetry locates itself in the world as verse translation does.
Nashim: A Journal
of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues
OCTOBER
2013
(and 2017)
Toward the "Whole Fragment":
An Introduction to Lea Goldberg's Last Poems
This paper borrows the term “whole fragment” from American poet and scholar Ann Lauterbach and utilizes it in a consideration of Lea Goldberg's posthumously published poetry collection The Remains of Life. In contrast to the traditional fragment, which laments in its very presence a lost whole, the whole fragment acknowledges and foregrounds its incompleteness as essential and intrinsic to its own poetic essence and statement. The essay given here is a revised version of the Nashim version, republished as the Introduction to On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg, HUC Press 2017.
Tikkun
MARCH
2016
From Holocaust to Protest: The Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner
On Tuvia Ruebner’s unique trajectory from being a voice of the Holocaust generation to becoming also a poet of protest.
Marginalia /
LARB
MAY
2014
Translating Poetry: An Act and Art of Preserving the Essential
After an extended engagement as translator with the poetic oeuvre of Hebrew poet Tuvia Ruebner, leading to the first-ever edition of Ruebner's poetry in English (In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner), Rachel Tzvia Back considers the art, act and ethos informing the translation process.
The Forward
AUGUST
2015
For Each Day of the Gaza War, These Jewish Women Are Fasting
One block from the Israeli Prime Minister’s house, Jewish women are fasting for 50 days — the 50 days of last summer’s Gaza war. Rachel Tzvia Back takes us inside their protest tent.
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