Haim Watzman Yisrael and Shalom, In response to your comments on my post “Mahmoud Darwish, Zionist Poet,” if you read more carefully, you’ll see that: a) I don’t put down the Jew, but rather express my admiration for Greenberg’s poetry; b) I except myself from Darwish’s politics, while expressing admiration for his poetry; c) I [...]

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Haim Watzman What’s a Zionist to make of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet whose funeral today in Ramallah will be a celebration of both Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian culture? Darwish was a refugee. His family came from the village of Birwa, near Acre, and fled to Lebanon in the wake of Israel’s War of [...]

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Maimonides wrote that we should avoid extremes and aspire to the middle way. He was referring to virtues and vices, not poetry. But in encountering a poem that does not adopt any of the classical forms, one good way to grasp its structure is sometimes simply to count the lines, figure out which one falls [...]

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Contrary to the common wisdom, the Israelites were not liberated from slavery at the time of the Exodus. Many midrashim and commentaries stress that what actually happened was a change of ownership: they had been slaves to Pharoah, and then they became slaves to God. When I was younger, this interpretation rang false to me. [...]

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“This unhealable self in myself who knows what I should know.” A man visiting an exhibition of exposed human tissue reflects despairingly on the disconnect between  his body and his soul, and between his soul and his self. The poem is “Dissections,” the poet C. K. Williams. When it appeared in The Atlantic in November [...]

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