Benjamin Balint & Matti Friedman: 1973 & 2023
On today’s episode, Abe spoke with two brilliant Jerusalem-based journalists, Ben Balint and Matti Friedman. Ben’s most recent book, Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in biography. Matti Friedman is the author, most recently, of Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.
When Abe asked them how they were processing the tragedy, they said, characteristically, that they’ve been doing so through writing. In our Winter issue, Matti wrote a brilliant reflection on the novel Adjusting Sights by Haim Sabato, a great Hebrew novel about the Yom Kippur War, while Ben dived into a new biography about Golda Meir by Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt.
Their work has helped them consider the unsettling similarities between today’s war, and the war of fifty years ago, and the discussion is wide-ranging, exploring the question of when we can begin to write about events, the uniquely Israeli perspective of Haim Sabato’s novel, and the ways that both Sabato and Meir wove the past in with their present through the use of story.
Suggested Reading
My Father and Birnbaum’s Heavenly City
According to one scholar, Uriel Birnbaum produced “more than 6,000 poems, 130 essays, 30 plays, 10 short stories, 15 fairy tales, fragments of a longer epic poem, 20 chapters of a lost novel and 30 collections of illustrations.” And yet, Birnbaum received little acclaim in his lifetime. Today he is all but unknown.
EUGENE NADELMAN: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse
"Our tale's debut / Takes place in 1982 / When I, for one, if not exactly / A double of our leading guy / Was like him, bookish, awkward, shy." - Coming of age in iambic tetrameter.
An Unusable Past?
What did Jewish women know about Torah, and when did they know it?
A Rejoinder
The Jewish Review of Books Podcast Benjamin Balint & Matti Friedman: 1973 & 2023 Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 35:42 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 35:42 | Recorded on April 1, 2024 I didn’t know that there was…
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