Blog

For Alon Confino

July 5, 2024 - By Darcy Buerkle

Editor's note: Alon Confino, director of the IHGMS at UMass, died on June 27, after a long illness. Professor Buerkle offered the following remarks at his funeral on July 2.

My name is Darcy Buerkle, I am a faculty member in the History department at Smith College and it is a great honor to be asked to say a few words about the work of my beloved colleague and dear friend.

Alon’s insights and contributions to the historical profession were singular, incisive, and undeniable: for anyone working on memory generally or in the field of German Jewish history in particular, he was and will remain a voice not only of erudition; his was also a voice of learned and emotional courage. An enormously accomplished scholar with many publications to his name, there was...

Three for the Fourth

July 3, 2024 - By Marsha Bryant

From the mountains and prairies, to ocean’s white foam:
Hail the beers of America. Let your tastes roam!
‘Twixt Atlantic, Pacific
Come brewers prolific
With tributes for toasting this spacious-skied home.

So gallantly streaming, beers pour
Into glasses and cups for the Fourth.
From the crisp, from the tart,
to the hoppy—the heart
Of the country pumps out brews galore!

Here are three for the Fourth just for you—
A wide-ranging assortment of brew.
One’s classic, one’s play-
ful. Nostalgia holds sway
In the last one I choose to review.

1
Ragged Glory—O long may it wave
With a fresh-hop approach and a fla-
vor that pairs with...

10 Questions for Daniel Wolff

July 2, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

If you’re gone for good—if you’re history -
I’ll know to search along rivers.
I’ll look for bones, trace foundations,
piece old shapes from shards.

But time will take those, too.
Strangers arriving with children will run
the length of the ruins for hide-and-seek,
squeals of living delight.
—from "Always Beside a River," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I don’t remember its name. Not sure it had a name. It was a long, probably rhyming narrative along the lines of “The highway man came riding, riding...” Written in the back of shall we say a 5th grade class. To the interest of some fellow classmates...

10 Questions for Alexandra Berlina

June 25, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

@josephbrodsky puts on a snuggly tune,
tweets a few words: “December. Like counting spoons
in the sideboard after a guest is gone.”
Grins on rereading:
this is the perfect tone.

Gets up, goes to the window, looks out. It strikes
him that the day, still young, has grown dusky. Like
a snowflake that—having lived a second in flight,
fragile, glittering, weightless, dazzlingly white—
—from "@josephbrodsky," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I always wanted to be a literary translator, but had to make do with scholarly texts at first. Shklovsky: The Reader (2014) was the first breakthrough, an in-between project: he...

Vogliamo Tutto

June 21, 2024 - By SABINE BROECK

Vogliamo Tutto

Since I wrote “Staatsraison: Dispatch From Germany” six months ago, Germany has seen an avalanche of staatsraison attacks, supported across the political spectrum. These attacks have often been mobilized and led by representatives of the Deutsche Israelische Gesellschaft, the journal Jüdische Allgemeine, and by Zionist factions of Jewish communities in Germany, including youth groups and student leaders. With the rise of the Green Party, the post-1968 generation...