Meredith Gould, PhD, is the author of Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar? The Jewish Roots of Christian Worship. She is guest-blogging this week on Jewcy, and this is her first post.

Conventional wisdom: write about what you know. Crazy reality: write (a lot) about what I want everyone else to know. And yes, I do realize this may come across as presumptuous and possibly even arrogant.

Among the many things I want everyone else to know: Jews and Christians shared a God, faith, and many religious practices for nearly a century after Jesus died. We continue to share many more similarities than differences, although neither Christians nor Jews typically view it this way. In fact, I think we spend way too much time highlighting differences. Our world is a freaking mess as a result.

Hi, my name is Meredith Gould, and I'll be here all week writing not only about these issues, but about the tsouris that went into and emerged as a result of writing, Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar? Jewish Roots of Christian Worship.

For example, I got all add-and-delete with the word, tsouris. First I wrote, "about the carp that went into..." because I've been amusing myself lately by using "carp" instead of "crap." I like how that little bit of letter transposition looks on the screen, how it stops the eye, makes the mind wonder, "WTF?" before settling down into realizing it's a substitute for "crap."

In my case, the word "carp" also makes my mind wander into childhood memories of scarfing down prodigious amounts of smoked carp, whitefish salad and nova after being released from the bondage of Temple Sinai's Sunday school classes. But then, I deleted "carp" because I worried about using that word and going into the riff you just read. Surely it would generate nasty comments about stereotypically linking Jews with food, which is at best a hackneyed device. (Note: I will be writing about food issues.)

So, I decided to use tsouris, a Yiddish word so common that it's included in the Urban Dictionary. Did it really need to be italicized for Jewcy.com? Probably not, although italicizing the first instance use of a foreign word is good editorial form. I added, italicized, un-italicized, and then deleted tsouris altogether. Surely using Yiddish would generate nasty comments about trying to validate tribal affiliation. (Note: I will be writing about identity.)

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I never intended to become a Jewish writer. That's an absurd thing to say, of course: I am and always shall be Jewish, and have known I was a writer from the age of seven. What I mean is that I never anticipated being a writer on overtly Jewish subjects who would therefore be pigeonholed by publishers and readers alike.

I wrote numerous works of fiction throughout my teens and twenties, none of which included any Jewish element, but when I came to produce what would be my first published novel it seemed completely natural to me to draw on my own family history, which contained so much drama I could hardly resist fictionalising it into a narrative of my own (you can read the true story here). In doing so, I also found myself exploring themes of loss, family, identity and belonging which were deeply personal to me and deeply Jewish, but also, to my mind, universally human. I adopted the approach of portraying the universal experience through the very particular.

How naïve I was in hoping my acutely Jewish story would touch a general nerve, I have only gradually come to realise. First of all, I was completely unable to find a publisher in the UK even after the subsequent success of The Genizah at the House of Shepher in winning or being shortlisted for several prizes (Jewish prizes). Whatever the shortcomings of the novel itself, the narrowness of its perceived market undoubtedly stood in its way, as one or two editors were bold enough to tell me. To be a Jew in Britain is to be a minority among minorities, and so far as bookselling is concerned, the numbers do not add up. The idea that the book might have an appeal beyond the Jewish readership was never entertained.

America has been more welcoming to my work: it is here that I have been published, won prizes and found readers. New York, it seemed, took me to its heart, as I, indeed, have taken it to mine. Yet here too, so far as I can tell, my sphere remains almost entirely Jewish; though I believe I also have some readers among religious Christians. In addition, some of my readers seem to have assumed that I am American.

Of course, I do now see that, to the average reader, the titles of my books have something intimidating about them, not to mention my own name, which, apart from relegating me to the bottom right-hand corner of the bookshop shelves, is never likely to signal a novel of English manners. But my credo of the-universal-in-the-particular, to which I still hold, does prove dubious, it seems, when it comes to being a British Jewish writer. A British Jewish writer with Israeli roots, writing about Yorkshire, the lost tribes and Jerusalem. Now that's just too particular.

So where to now? I am no longer writing on Jewish subjects; my latest, as yet unpublished novel is about a village in northern England and the draft novel I have just completed is about women who have chosen not to have children. I have stopped writing on overtly Jewish themes not merely because I aspire to reach as wide a readership as possible but because, for the time being, I feel I have said all I have to say fictionally on those subjects. (Well, maybe not entirely. My Jewish sensibility will always influence my work and my village novel is still about natives and incomers, belonging and not belonging.) This is not to say that I won't return to Jewish territory. I still have at least one Jewish novel in me, and I hope to write it one day.

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This being my final entry I just want to add a note about blogging. I've always resisted having a blog so far because I felt it would take up too much of my working time. Writing a daily blog this week has proven to me what I suspected already: that I feel the choosing of words as such a heavy responsibility that regular blogging would consume an inordinate amount of headspace. I have always kept a private handwritten diary in which, since it is intended for my eyes alone and not for instant worldwide publication, I can write freely, easily and cathartically. Is the blog killing off the private journal? I hope not. But I thank Jewcy for giving me the opportunity to write here and express some of my thoughts in the presence of their readership.

A few weeks ago, we passed the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II. Not many people alive experienced it firsthand, and those who did were only children at the time. And yet that war remains the setting of countless contemporary novels, including my own. Why does it hold such an attraction for the fiction writer? (And for the reader, for that matter.) I'm not sure, but here are a few theories:

We write about it because 70 years later, we still cannot wrap our heads around what happened. I think there is a misconception that writing requires pure intellect, but I heard another writer say once that it also requires a certain amount of thick-headedness, to stare at the same spot on a wall for years and years. I think that's very accurate in this case. Many people, especially we who didn't experience the war, read the facts and the anecdotes and wonder how it was possible for these horrific scenarios to be perpetrated by sentient human beings. In this way, fiction is like myth-trying to reconstruct what we cannot explain.

We write about it to vicariously experience the ideals of that time. Strength of community. Steadfastness in love. Resilience in the face of suffering. Regret, forgiveness and redemption. Most of the time, these are considered outdated values in today's society. We live lives where we shy away from asking friends and family for even the smallest favor because we don't want to trouble them. Break-ups, divorce and cynicism in dating are commonplace. In our country especially, apathy, modern medicine and technology have been systematically eliminating emotional suffering, physical pain and each slight inconvenience as soon as it appears. And dense cities and relocation make it easier to avoid the person we have wronged rather than ask for forgiveness. The suffering of the war forced many of these ideals to the surface, but they have since receded. To go back to them, we need to resort to fiction.

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I've always privileged time for writing over time for reading, so I was late coming to Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I'd already been working on A Long, Long Time Ago on and off for over ten years by that point, but ironically, it was only after I started workshopping and publishing a series of stories set in Moscow that people started telling me, "You've got to read this book."

Now, I tend to read only for daily sustenance, without necessarily dwelling on the individual books, but I definitely remember reading that book.  It was the summer of 2005, and I took it along with me on a trip to Poland, the first leg of which was a few days in the Tatra Mountains with my friend Anna (who inspired the character of Irena in A Long, Long Time Ago).  I started reading it on the long bus ride, and laughed so often through the first chapter that I tried to translate it for Anna into Polish.  That night, we were staying in a one-room cabin, but I was so restless (or maybe jet-lagged) that I took the book into the bathroom and shut the door so Anna wouldn't be woken by the light.  I thought I would read one more chapter to put myself to sleep.  Maybe two.  At five in the morning, I was still sitting on the floor of that bathroom, finishing the last page.

Now that A Long, Long Time Ago is out, a few people (including whoever wrote the jacket copy) have said my book reminds them of Foer's.  Personally, I think Foer is a lot more adventurous in his experimentation with voice and structure, the way he loops back and forth in time, overlapping reality and magical realism.  In fact, these days I use his writing as an example for my students of the possibilities of fiction.  I think of my style as more straight-forward, old-fashioned storytelling, and I think I tend to visualize events in discrete scenes with clean edges.  

As for the material, we're definitely both pulling from the same realm.  World War II and the 90s were the crucial turning points of the 20th Century for both Poland and Western Ukraine, and it would be hard to write a book about either place without including these two time periods.  Also, L'viv/L'wów and Krakow share similar culture and aesthetics, and a common past.  (At several points in their history, modern Ukraine and Poland were joined, or at least jointly occupied by a third country.)  In both cities, Austro-Hungarian facades stand shoulder-to-shoulder with well-intentioned Soviet monstrosities, and the hippest cafés are adorned with collections of old clocks, sewing machines and school desks, a style that can perhaps best be described as "ironic attic chic."  

The rural areas are nearly identical as well.  Villages with names like "Cold Water" and "Squirrel" seem straight out of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosiński.  A few years ago, on a road/cowpath-trip around Bieszczady (in Eastern Poland) with my friend Anita (whose younger self inspired the character of Magda), I couldn't shake the feeling that I was driving through the pages of a storybook, as if at any moment, we might catch a glimpse of Baba Yaga's chicken-feet house or be stopped by a talking fox.  

And just as the mythical and the real coexist, so do the present and the past.  In conversations, people talk about the war as if it were yesterday, and the most hotly debated controversies usually have to do with things that happened several generations before.  Finally, after a long and often shared history of invasion, I think Jews and non-Jews from both countries wield a dark sense of humor as an antidote to suffering.  

Two summers ago, after living in and traveling to Poland for fifteen years, I finally crossed the border to Ukraine.  I spent a month volunteering in a village near the western border, which turned out to be not far from where my father's family is from, and probably not far from the character Jonathan Safran Foer's travels.  When I arrived, I have to say, I was a little disappointed that Alex and Sammy Davis Junior Junior were not waiting in a Lada to pick me up.  And this is probably the greatest testament to Everything Is Illuminated, that Foer, in such a short time was able to absorb and capture that singular atmosphere that I still find difficult to articulate, and create characters that, two years later, felt as if they could come alive and meet me at the train station.  I can only hope that my book will stick with its readers long enough for them to see Poland for themselves.

I want to say a few words about why I became a writer.

When I was young the form of speech we now refer to as narrative had a different name. It was called lying, and I was good at it. In the beginning, I was not good at making people believe in my lies. But I was definitely, from an early age, well established in my predilection for telling stories. Perhaps I felt that on the whole life was better served by exaggeration than by accurate description. Or perhaps I simply had a good imagination and enjoyed exercising it. All would have been well, I suppose, if I'd said that I was making up a story about what happened at nursery school or on the bus. But I kept insisting that things were as I said they were, and not as other people held them to be. I think I could tell the difference, I'm pretty sure I could. But I was offended on behalf of my stories when people gave preference to reality. From a child's point of view (which I still hold) what is so much better about the way things ‘really' are?

It was an important day when my mother gave me an illustrated book by Dr. Seuss. And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street was the story of a little boy whose imagination brought him to ever more florid and enthusiastic descriptions of what he saw when walking down Mulberry Street. To me as a child the story seemed to say: ‘well, of course, we know that these things could not have been seen on Mulberry Street, but does it matter? Look at the beautiful illustrated tales we've been able to come up with. We've even been able to write a book about them. Isn't that better than plain old ordinary Mulberry Street?' I was surprised that my mother seemed to endorse this point of view and I was heartened by it. Somewhere, deep in her heart, beneath the constant criticism of my tendency to tell lies, there had to be another sort of understanding.

Like many post-modern people, I have a serious doubt that such a thing as Truth exists; like William James, I'm not sure how we'd recognize it if we came across it. Does truth come dressed in a uniform, or wearing a badge, or naked where other possibilities are clothed? Stories, when they are not considered lies, are perhaps as close as we can come to the elusive nature of ourselves which other forms of self-accounting (analysis, introspection, interpretation etc.) cannot reach. Just as, in a play, every character is speaking for the playwright; just as, in a romance, a child that never grew up is spinning its fantasies: so too, lost, neglected, forgotten, betrayed bits of the self get resurrected in our stories. Sometimes abandoned shapes of us get to consider what might have been had they been chosen. What if, after all, she had decided to remain on a Kibbutz? What if, after all, she hadn't returned to America after her child was born? Over the years I've wondered if it is the sheer telling of a story, the activity of dredging up and putting the pieces together that serves a vivid purpose in reconciling ourselves to ourselves and to our ever-living past. A story organizes, gives form, draws out connecting threads, discovers or imposes meaning. It also reveals truths (note the small ‘t') some of which hide from the surface of the story but peep through nonetheless in the telling.

I find it interesting, when I listen, as a professional listener, with open-ended fascination to a person's narrative, how flexibly it changes and develops. People stop being afraid of self-contradiction, of the natural tendency for the story to change as details are remembered or dropped or the perspective shifts.

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Growing up I was the fat girl; the kids at school called me “Moose.” I eventually lost weight, thinking thin would improve things, most noticeably my confidence, and I mistakenly carried this notion into adulthood, believing each man I dated would want me more, want me longer, or want me back, if he learned I’d lost a few pounds. Once I realized my appearance wasn’t the key ingredient to true confidence, I committed The Little Engine That Could to memory, got a new antiperspirant, and learned to only look at myself in skinny mirrors.

The truth is, I think the older we get the less tolerance we have for BS. That ability not to care, to be confident no matter what anyone else thinks, that's self-esteem. I recognize that my time here is limited. I played by my parents’ rules as a child (and adult), made nice in the political work arena, sent my share of thank you notes for things one would be thankful to be rid of (hello, reindeer sweater), and I got to a point where I realized I could continue to live their lives or I could stop worrying so much what others thought or expected and finally start to live my own. I think that’s what confidence is, the ability to appreciate and trust yourself. And that takes practice. So it makes sense that being prepared, as much as we’re able to be, breeds confidence.

I’m often asked, “How do you find the courage to publish such personal stories about your life? In print, on the web. Forever!” This of course ties into confidence, but I also believe by putting myself out there and sharing my deepest thoughts and insecurities, I’m able to feel more connected with the world, and I know in doing so, it helps others feel less alone. Just the same, sometimes there are things I’m still trying to work out in my life, so I turn to my bedside handwritten journal and write it all out, knowing it’s just for me. I let it sit. Sometimes I return to the diary and decide that in publishing it, it might help someone else feel better about their own life.

When I write in my journal, I’m completely free to write what I want, what I really need to say, keeping that panicked exacting editor voice of mine at bay. I write as if no one will ever read what I have to say because the moment I worry about the responses of others--what my mother will think, my boss, or spouse—is the moment I stop being honest. When we begin to edit and play it safe we stop being authentic.

Stephanie Klein, author of Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

About six years ago I began writing my memoir. That I was relatively young - only twenty years old - and wasn't famous did not seem important. I didn't even know that I was writing a book until about two years later when I was looking at twenty candid essays chronicling a troubled past and my relationship with my high-society grandmother. I gave my project a title. I called it the Upper East Side Syndrome. I told friends about it, parading bound versions of drafts like a newborn at a bris. When people asked if I wanted to go to some party or club where people were having fun, I usually bowed out gracefully claiming that my book needed more work.

The first setback was that I couldn't stop writing. I'd be sitting at my laptop hacking away and then I'd remember another funny anecdote that just had to be made into a story. The number of essays grew and I mined my memory for more. I read everything I could about the craft of memoir. I set deadlines that I did not meet. The end grew farther and farther away.

Even when I wasn't writing, I was thinking about writing. A year before I found an agent I tried to quit writing. I was full of confidence in my writing in college, but when I tried submitting essays from my book, they were rejected. Some rejections had encouraging notes from editors; most did not. I doubted myself and decided to concentrate on other things, like my job or a relationship. I put the latest draft of the book in a drawer and left it there for nine months. Still I could not stop seeing my life in print. I would go to work and something funny would happen, and I'd think "that's a story."

But later that year I got a phone message from an editor asking for permission to print a story I had submitted. The message was full of static, and I could not make out the magazine title the first time I listened. I did hear his name was Dan Lynch from a magazine that had New York in the title, which meant only one thing to me: The New Yorker. Flushed with excitement, I dropped the phone and high-fived the air in elation before remembering I didn't submit anything to The New Yorker. I picked the phone back up and concentrated on Mr. Lynch's voice. As it happens it was not The New Yorker calling. It was a small magazine called New York Stories, which I had in fact submitted something to. Still, this was big news. I was finally going to be a published author! That single publication was all it took to renew my interest in writing.

I dug out my defunct manuscript and reread it with a red pen. It was not a pretty sight and I decided to rewrite the whole thing. Six more months went by writing and rewriting. People who knew I'd been writing wanted to know when the book was going to be published, and I did not have an answer for them. I couldn't even decide whether I was writing a memoir or a novel. Everything was true, but what would happen when my estranged family heard I was writing a book?

I took a step back from the laptop again and reevaluated my intentions. If I wanted to write a memoir, displaying my dysfunctional family for the entire world, then I needed to understand why. Sure I wanted to be published, but I didn't know that writing nonfiction was any more likely to get me published than writing fiction. Besides, there had to be some good reason why I had been writing true stories from my past all along. I just needed to figure out what it was. So I decided to fly back home to New York from where I'd been living in Florida for an investigative trip.

Because New York is home to me, I viewed it with a mixture of longing and apprehension. Longing because it's home, the site of my happiest childhood memories -and it was a very happy childhood - and apprehension because due to the unraveling of my family in my adult life I can't return home. That was what I was writing about. So this particular trip wasn't a fun-filled time of dinners and reunions. It was me trying to figure out how things went so wrong and how I would write about it. I ended up wandering the city where I once lived and replaying my childhood. Here's FAO Schwarz where I was almost arrested for shoplifting the Barbies I couldn't bring myself to ask for. Here's Central Park where I roamed endlessly and where I once learned that my entire life had been a carefully orchestrated lie.

Museum MileMost of my book takes place in one of the prestigious apartment building's on the Upper East Side's Museum Mile - that glorious stretch of Fifth Avenue from 82^nd Street to 105^th - but I hadn't been home since my mother threw me out of the house when I was eighteen. Our apartment building sits across from the Met and I sat down on the steps outside the museum. I could see the same doorman I knew when I lived there, and I wondered if he'd remember me. I am on a list of names not to admit inside.

I looked up at what I thought was my old room's window and saw a figure looking out at Central Park. Who would be in my room now? Did they see me? It was then, sitting on the outside and trying to look in, that I realized why I started writing my memoir to begin with, and why it had to stay a memoir. It wasn't because I was mad, or greedy enough to write one of those tell-all books. I wrote because I was confused, and I thought that through writing I could finally get some answers to my questions. I was trying to write my way to closure, trying to find my way back home.

I got up and crossed Fifth Avenue, half-expecting someone to come out of my old building and tell me to leave. When they did not, I took out my camera and snapped a picture of the building's awning. I took a picture of the American flag outside the building. I walked back across the street and got a picture of my old room's window. I was like the paparazzi of my own past. I must have been taking pictures for an hour before the camera's battery gave out, and I felt a gust of summer wind. It was time to move on, to go back home and finish the book.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging this week as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch bloggers. Matt's book tells the story of his humorous childhood hijinks.

Just a moment ago, it occurred to me that I was naked and standing in front of an open door. Now, besides my nine-year-old boxer, I live alone, and while for some living alone might seem an obvious invitation to turn one's home into a satellite nudist colony, I am not one of these people. Let me tell you, the way that I was raised was not conducive to casual nakedness. In fact, my grandparents (who stepped in to raise me after my own parents refused) were so modest that I would have been more comfortable growing up in Victorian England than in New York's Upper East Side of the 1980s. So the realization that not only was I naked, but that I was advertising myself like someone looking for trade, surprised me.

This is what happened. Earlier this morning, I went for a run with my dog and came home sweaty. I was in the process of taking off my clothes and piling myself into the shower when I got a text message from a friend suggesting I might want to read an article in the newspaper. Curious, I picked it up and quickly became so engrossed that I forgot what I was supposed to be doing (showering), and I forgot what my body was doing (walking), until I looked up through the open patio door and saw my neighbor waving at me. Fortunately, the newspaper concealed just enough to make the situation only moderately embarrassing. She's kind of a lush anyway, so there's a fair chance if she got an early start today she won't remember any of this.

I don't tell you any of this to introduce my new alter ego, Nudie Rothschild, nor do I begin my blogging stint on Jewcy with something embarrassing in order to make myself more endearing, though, admittedly, that's something I would do. No, I wanted to tell you about my sojourn into nudity to illustrate why I write. It's very simple. I write because I can still get so lost in the power of words that I completely forget myself. As a writer, it's my dream to do that for someone else. I want someone lost in the forest of my words with only my voice as a guide.

In truth, I didn't set out to be a writer. Sometimes you hear writers talk about teething on pencils instead of ice cubes, and writing before they were talking. That wasn't me. For me writing was a necessity; it was the only way that I could win praise. By the time I was in high school, I had already been expelled from five different schools (think Holden Caulfieldwith a pronounced Jewfro and an additional seventy-five pounds), and it was obvious that my hard-assed teachers saw me as the vehicle to finally drive them over the edge. So imagine everyone's surprise when the Fifth Avenue Delinquent (one of my more colorful nicknames) began earning As on papers. Actually, I can credit writing for finally giving me the impetus to turn myself around in school. I remember one particular teacher holding a paper of mine and saying,"Matt, you're very intelligent, but nobody will ever care if you're always going to act like a prick." From that point on, any assignment I could do in writing, I wrote.

Still, it wasn't until I was in college living in San Francisco that I realized my future lay in writing. A friend had come out to visit, and in his haste to make his returning flight, he left a copy of David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day in m ycar. I hadn't read the book, but I had heard of Sedaris. People told me I should read him because we had a similar sense of humor.

Later that night I began reading and quickly lost myself. That was the first time I could remember something like that happening. Sure I had enjoyed books before, but not like this. If a book can do this for me, I thought, this is what I want to do for someone else. Looking back, finding that book was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had been in college for too long racking up majors and degrees, but nothing affected me like the temptation to reach people through writing. It was after reading Me Talk Pretty One Day and then [an earlier Sedaris book] Naked that the seed for my book Dumbfounded began germinating in the back of my mind.

Having already spilled the beans about why I write, I'll tell you I have a lot to accomplish this week. In five posts I have to introduce you to me, and hopefully persuade you to give my book a chance. And with so many fantastic books vying for readers right now, that's going to be a task. But if there's one thing you need to know about me from the start, it's that I love a challenge, and-as you can see from the naked anecdote above-I have no shame when it comes to writing.

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

I can personally vouch for David F. Smydra's insightful post into the reasons mainstream media fails at substantively covering religion. It was the summer of 1999, a year after graduation, and in the pre-millennial madness that enveloped God's city – the sanatorium averaged two messiahs a month the years before, it was getting seven a week at the time – I lost my bearings somewhere around the Damascus Gate. Only in Jerusalem can one feel so lost.

It happens to most at some point, my editor at the Jerusalem Post explained, "The book of psalms calls Jerusalem the City of God and Zechariah calls it the City of Truth – but which God and whose truth?"

The city and the country itself forces one to wrestle with these eternal questions. And without answers, the lines between fact and faith, religion and politics, the sacred and the secular blurred, leaving behind a conflicted and confused young reporter.

My parents are Israeli-born, but raised their children in America. I've been straddling borders religious, national or otherwise all my life. I thought I was as well equipped as anyone to deal with whatever Israel threw at me: a degree in philosophy from Vassar, a thesis on Kierkegaard and Jewish thought, and a six-month research and ethnographic study at Hebrew University.

It wasn't enough to cover religion in Israel. While interviewing a Sufi mystic in Ramallah, the man leaned over and whispered, "Hamas will some day live by the words of Rumi and not the sword of Allah." If I had known then that he was referring to the 13th century poet Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, who preached tolerance, I would have recognized the importance of his statement. A Palestinian religious leader was, in effect, condemning his own. It didn't make the paper, because I didn't realize what was meant till much later.

Many of my colleagues had similar experiences. The American Press, by and large, lacks a critical perspective informed by knowledge. To a journalist, skepticism is the pillar in which all else is built. But how can one honestly question doctrine or deed without an understanding of either?

In Israel, my experience as a journalist begged the question of how religion is covered. In America, it's why religion isn't covered enough.

After a year, I left the Jerusalem Post to help start a media venture started by CNN executives targeting Baby Boomers, a demographic in hot pursuit of 'what it all means.' I interviewed Deepak Chopra, Rabbi Harold Kushner, leading academics and other figures in the spiritual marketplace, and I came to understand that you cannot grapple with America, its history and contemporary forces, without understanding the nature and history of its religious life.

Spotty religious reporting isn't a new thing. Louis Cassels wrote a much-read syndicated religion column from 1959 to 1973 for United Press International. He admitted that the worst error he remembered making was repeating the historically discredited claim that Islam was spread forcibly by the sword during religion's years of early growth, "My error stemmed from plain ignorance rather than malice."

Faith matters, and not only within the walls of a church, synagogue or mosque. There is Bible study at a Houston oil and gas company. Weekly yoga at dot-coms. Torah class at Microsoft and Islamic study at Whirlpool. In this year's presidential elections, there are relentless invocations of the Almighty. So why isn't coverage better? Why do editors show such a disregard when pitched with a religion story?

A media and religion survey by the First Amendment Center found that 76% of religion writers felt that formal training in religious studies is either helpful or essential. Sadly, 6 out of 10 writers said they had no such training.

Much of the media views religion suspiciously, or worse, as irrelevant. Journalists deal in matters of fact, religion in matters of faith, and rarely the twain shall meet. When they do, it's usually because religion intersects with politics or scandal. The latter usually determines the treatment of the former and as a result neither is dealt with wisely. So it's not just a question of giving religion more prominence, but encountering it with more understanding.

More important than the sort of knowledge one gains in the academy is what you might call religious street smarts or pew-level understanding. Contending with the powerful convictions and lofty ideas inherent to the beat require an intellectual grounding supported by a naive narrator's immersion into the experience of faith -- what journalists covering a war call "embedded." The "small" stories, the quiet, daily influence of religion on people's lives are as important as the larger issues that arise from covering belief systems or religious philosophy.

Is anyone doing a good job? There are a handful. Jeff Sharlet, editorial adviser to Jewcy, may be among the finest. His investigative reports from the evangelical front lines appearing in publications like Rolling Stone and Harpers are the very embodiment of pew-level reportage that are also intellectually grounded. His daily review of religion and the press, called The Revealer, is one of the better religion sites on the Web.

Here's a snapshot of what Sharlet, and his colleagues at The Revealer, find worthwhile elsewhere on the Web:

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion looks at "religion in the news" from a perspective that's not so much liberal as relentlessly skeptical of absurdity, and intrigued by belief.

Casing the Promised Land offers an intelligent roundup of religion news from a center-left perspective.

Christianity Today's blog is a superb resource regardless of your faith or lack thereof. Regular blogger Ted Olson roams far and wide and has the wisdom to bring back more than just the controversy of the day.

DeepBlog: Not a God beat blog itself, but a good directory to the blogosphere with a growing list of "Spiritual Blogs."

Direland, a sharply written politcs and media blog by journalist Doug Ireland, occasionally runs a "theocracy watch" colum

On Religion is an excellent newsclipping service -- terrific links to the hot topic of the moment and good finds from the lesser-known press.

OpEdNews's Religion and Politics page publishes a fine collection of original, politically progressive religion essays as well as links to other noteworthy religion articles.

The Raving Atheist, "An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief [on] How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics," is an intensely intelligent, often funny, and all around well-made blog that's good enough for true believers as well as godless folk.

Relapsed Catholic is a fierce godblog without mercy for liberals or unbelievers, by Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian journalist and poet with a sharp eye for the absurd and compelling.

Brian Flemming is the man behind Bat Boy: The Musical, and his blog is everything you'd expect from a man with such interests. Which, naturally, include religion, commented on from a smart, liberal perspective. Mostly limited to the news of the day, you'll find original ideas here, and, if you care to do some free associating with Brian's other interests, genuine inspiration.

Makeout City's Jay McCarthy understands the art of linking and the collage possibilities of threading together fragments from around the web -- whether they're his own thoughts or collected ideas from others, his posts are always essays. Jay is a man who gets the Montaignesque potential of blog. He often comments on religion, a subject in which Jay has read widely and eclecticly.

The Claremont Review of Books, put out by the conservative Claremont Institute ("a new, reinvigorated conservatism, one that draws upon the timeless principles of the American founding, and applies them to the moral and political problems that we face today") is an interesting, intellectual read, whether or not you agree with their purpose, to help conservatism "understand its own majestic purposes, and become a more effective political force."

Nth Position is a webzine that advertises "high weirdness" in all areas of inquiry; investigate their "strangeness" category for manifestations of the divine. Excellent writing and surprisingly good reporting (given that there's limited cash behind this fine endeavor).

Oliver Willis bills himself as "kryptonite to stupid," and we can testify to that slogan's truth. Hey, wait -- does that make us dumb? Nah. It just means Oliver is really smart. His popular blog is mostly political talk from a "center-left" perspective, but we think it's relevant to Revealer readers because Oliver gets the role of religion in American politics. That is, he gets that it has one, whether we like it or not, and that Dems and liberals in the U.S. are blind to its full influence and importance beyond the borders of New York and L.A.

One Inch Ahead features an interesting confluence of spirit and flesh--in the occasionally religious musings of a long distance runner.

For my generation of writers, Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th of renal failure, was the ultimate father figure. We measured ourselves against the sweep of his brilliance—for it must be conceded that even his lesser books had the sweep of brilliance—our whole adult lives. He was the giant who dared giant leaps and, more than occasionally, giant pratfalls. Thus my drive to his brick house on the very end of Cape Cod in Provincetown, Mass. some months ago had the excitement and dread of a pilgrimage. Beside me on the passenger seat, the author photo on his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, drilled into me with a father’s intensity—equally admonishing and exhortatory—until I finally had to cover it with my hat. But I took my hat off when I entered his house and started asking questions.

Whatever else that can be said about it, this new book is written with the vigor of someone half your age.

Good to hear. But every time I hear compliments, my feet start doing this [twitching].

Not the shy, retiring type: A first edition of Advertisements for Myself You want to run away?

I’ve never learned to take a compliment graciously.

How come?

Damned if I know. My father, an elegant man, always took compliments very well. But I, being rough hewn, loved messing his hair. Maybe I defined myself in opposition to him.

In this book, the relationship between young Adi (Adolph) and his father is very fraught—more moving than I expected it to be.

I’ve been thinking about how many of my books have that recurring theme. My relationship with my father was very interesting. Not hostile, but never near. I couldn’t reach him. He was an exceptionally complex man. He was very proud of me after “The Naked and the Dead,” which he must have read ten times.

Did he “get” it?

Oh yeah.

So you were able to communicate on that very deep level.

Yeah, he didn’t go in for long speeches, but he would look at me and say,“This is good.”

Was it from him that you got your grit?

My father was a very bold man in his quiet way. And my mother was a remarkable woman—not only strong but also loving.

You demonize Hitler here, quite literally—the demon narrator is there at the conception. Aren’t you thereby letting mankind off the hook?

It seems to me there have been two exceptional births in human history: Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler. Hitler is the devil’s answer to Jesus Christ.

Oedipal shmedipal, as long as he loves his mother: Mailer's Hilter had some Freudian issuesYou like making large statements, don’t you?

Drives wives crazy.

I can only imagine.

I make them for the sheer joy of making them.

When you read younger novelists today, are you impatient that they don’t seek to go larger?

I don’t read them. Which I think is one of the reasons they’re not particularly in love with me.

Whom do you read for pleasure?

I find I can’t read good novels anymore—not when I’m working—because they’re too disruptive. I get excited by them, and go off in all sorts of directions. How would I do if I were writing it? And I get off my own work. I’m immensely single-minded, I’d even say dull, about sticking to my own work. For the last ten years I’ve always felt I’ve got one book left, one book left, one book left.

If there’s still one left after this one, what will it be?

A sequel to this one about Hitler. In this last, after all, I only take him to age 16. I think there’s a little more to him …

Are you impatient with some of your contemporaries for not contending with the larger questions?

Look, for better or for worse, I have that kind of mind. They have [theirs]. I used to be very competitive. By now I’m sick of it, in the sense that it has no meaning. Either one of us will last, or ten of us, who knows. History can wipe all of us out.

I wasn’t expecting to hear such mellowness from you.

It’s not mellowness, it’s shared amusement. After competing with someone who used to be a rival, in the end we have a shared conversation. I respect Roth, I respect Updike, DeLillo, Vonnegut, I could name ten of them, they’re all good writers.

One book left?: The pugilist in his last daysSalinger?

Salinger I’m pissed off at, because he had such a glimpse into America when he was young, and he didn’t use it.

Any theory as to why he went silent?

No theory worth airing.

At your age [of 83], are you more prudent not to air a theory if it’s half-baked?

I’ve gone off half-cocked so many times in my youth that yes, now I’m a little older…

So you’re still actively growing?

Better growth than decrepitude.

It’s marvelous that you have this capacity…

Well listen, we’ll see. But I can guarantee you one thing: At the moment there are 20 writers, male and female, who feel that they are the best living American writer. And I of course am one of them. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

You deal in opposites a lot, don’t you? You like the way the world is balanced.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

So how do you finally measure up on the wisdom scale?

I’d probably give myself a very good mark.

Care to offer a numerical grade?

[Chuckling] No. That would not be wise.

As a man, are you ever intimidated?

Not anymore. The best thing about old age is that you’re no longer intimidated by anybody. There’s a real cool that comes in with old age.

* * *

NEXT: Read Shvitz post From White Negro to Jewish Hipster: Jews Still Acting Black in 2007, by Eric Goldstein

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Michael Weiss wrote an obituary for Mailer, Abe Greenwald compared him to Bono, and Stefan Beck called him an example of the free pass we give literary rock stars of a certain age.

[This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

This week on FaithHacker our guest editor is Amy Guth, writer extraordinaire. Amy Guth is the author of Three Fallen Women, which she is perpetually schlepping around to pimp out. Between travels, she's the woman with the pink-stripey hair usually starting up the horah at MOT get-togethers. Keeping true to her stick-it-to-the-man Hebrew namesake (Shifreh), she has written about feminism, sexism, tikkun olam, tzedekah, blaxploitation, social reform, media literacy and all sorts of other things for The Believer, Monkeybicycle, Bookslut, Hungry Chicago, Four Magazine, JewishFringe.com, and The Complete Meal, among others. She blogs Bigmouth indeed Strikes Again about everything, Granola Bar D'var about jewy eco-kasher goodness, and a few other spots here and there, has collaborated on a few shows within Second City's Training Center and is an assistant fiction editor at 42 Opus. The select few remember the days when she dabbled in improv, as well, including the night she was the "Kill Whitey" crayon. Stalk her silly at Guth-a-Go-Go.com.

Amy Guth: gets all Jewcy Last week Amy and I met up at a coffee shop in Chicago to talk about what we love, like and wish. Plus, boys, tattoos, and lots of Jewcy goodness. Here's some highlights of our conversation:

TF: In your book, Three Fallen Women, there are a lot of non specific spiritual revelations. Why did you decide to keep Judaism out of it explicitly? Do you feel like there's a difference between Jewish spirituality and other kinds of spirituality? What is it?

AG: To me, the spiritual is the spiritual. I don't think there's one true path; I think that whatever you feel in your bones is right for you. I love Kol Nidre, for example, and during services, I can't help but feel like there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be and nothing else I'd rather be doing. Any sort of spiritual practice that brings that feeling about is right for the person doing it, including, in my opinion, seemingly secular activities that anyone finds joy or meaning through. I had this coach that I trained with for my first marathon who used to say something like "running is my religion" and I knew just what she meant. She didn't mean anything about rote or routine, but that feeling, the same as the feeling I also get on a great run and in the example I used of Kol Nidre. It's right for her down to her bones, so she finds spiritual meaning in it. I can dig that for anyone from any background.

You know, I think I'm always thinking about the ethereal and the spiritual so much that I didn't really ever make a conscious decision, I just wrote about my world view, really. I had a few Hebrew words and some transliterated lines from Mourner's Kaddish in the original manuscript of Three Fallen Women, but I cut them in the end for accessibility. I was writing about pretty universal themes, and didn't want to exclude anyone from it, or alienate a reader for not, say, knowing a particular word, or knowing what it means to say Mourner's Kaddish.
Three Fallen Women: try it--you'll like it!
TF: What do you consider your most spiritual practice? Why?

AG: I think I already started to go here a little in my previous answer, because I don't necessarily weigh one thing as having greater spiritual weight than another out of the things where I find meaning. And, it's always changing. I find meaning in some things for ages then one day, it doesn't fit. To me, that's a very Jewish thing-- to have the freedom and sense of self-reliance to know when it's time to try something new, or do something in a new way or even to abandon it entirely, if need be.

I tend to not categorize things as "Orthodox stuff", "Reform stuff", etc., but just to do what feels right. I just try to listen to my gut and do well. But, if I had to pick one thing, I would have to say that I could boil my entire spiritual life down to trying to be as compassionate as possible. I try to know where my money goes when I buy something, how my products and foods were manufactured/grown, who my choices benefit/harm, and I try to just keep things simple and go with the kindest possible option.

I do this occasional feature on my blog Bigmouth Indeed Strikes Again, called Guthmantics where I interview an author. A few weeks ago I interviewed Margaret Sartor, author of Miss American Pie, who I read with in New Orleans last spring. She said something in the interview that I ended up blogging about a second time: I wrote, "I keep thinking about that beautiful thing Margaret Sartor said on here the other day when I interviewed her: 'I believe that compassion is a kind of power and kindness may be the one virtue that can save us all — if it's not already too late.' And, I believe that so hard that it almost makes my chest hurt. That sentence is my religion, my world view, a summary of everything I really believe in."

TF: What do you find to be the most frustrating thing(s) about the Jewish community today?

AG: I feel like there are a lot of things that people assume without really knowing and make a lot of declarations about what we should and shouldn't be doing as Jews, when I feel like Judaism is such an encompassing thing and, I mean, really, it's really constructed to find things for yourself, I feel. It's built to live and let live in a way, so when things arise, I really hear it because it seems so antithetical to what Judaism is to me. But, even in saying that, I'm sort of doing just that. I suppose in wanting to freedom to make Jewish choices, I have to give people the space to think there isn't room for anything but by-the-book.

TF: Where do you go to shul? What do you love or hate about it?

AG: Oh, my rabbi would be so mad if a stalkery type showed up at services. I like having a designated place to just sit and be and think, and I like the sense of community that being a member of a shul offers. What don't I like? Hmm, not much. I guess it's a little un-fun when it becomes about politics and committees instead of encouraging and supporting each other.

TF: What's your favorite part about the High Holidays?

AG: I love anything that feels tabula rasa. A new start. The High Holidays are so inspiring in that way to me. A sort of life inventory, outward and inward, and really sitting with myself and my thoughts (I tend to write a lot of essays around the High Holidays) and thinking about how my choices affect my life and the people around me I care for. Maybe a little hokey, but true.

TF: I know you have this blog, Granola Bar Dvar. What's the impetus behind the blog?

AG: I have my main, general blog, Bigmouth indeed Strikes Again, and a couple of side blogs, including Granola Bar Dvar, where I take the weekly parsha and think about it in the most practical, earthy and applicable terms I can, which usually ends up pointing to environmental, social and interpersonal issues. It was really something I did secretly for a while just to kick around ideas about the world and people, in my own sort of outside-the-box granola way, and it came pretty naturally to me. I hear something, anything really, and think about how it relates to my life in practical and applicable terms and I wasn't seeing much of that out there, so I tried my hand at it and really got a lot out of it. I like taking a time out and writing a piece for Granola Bar D'var and thinking about the spiritual and the things we can't know but can only really consider. That said, I'm a jerk and I haven't updated it in a bit.

What's your earliest Jewish memory?

AG: Latkes.

TF: It seems like you're a really disciplined writer. How have you gotten that discipline, and has it been helpful in other areas of life? How?

AG: Thanks, I try to be. I think I am fairly disciplined in most areas of my life. Maybe even too much in some areas, if that's even possible...? No, not really. I mean, I'm human, whatever. I do yoga, I'm a distance runner, and when do those things or write, I tend to put a song on a continuous loop for... something like mantra-like steadiness. It's not as compulsive as it sounds, and not based in compulsion at all, really, but in the way the repetitive sound and motion gets my brain to turn off of the daily blah-blah and lists and such and sort of open up and let me get down to the real things to think about and consider.

TF: Can you tell me something about your next book?

AG: It got a lot of stripped down elemental stuff in it. A lot of fire and water, but in subtle ways. Some of the woman-breaks-out-and-does-the-thing-people-think-she-cannot themes are in there that are present in Three Fallen Women, I think, but that just might be my thing, at least for now. I try to do new things and creep myself out to have new experiences. That's the name of the game, right?

TF: How do you feel about this whole "trendy Judaism" thing? Do you think Judaism is cool?

AG: Well, I have mixed feelings about it all. On one hand, I hate how Kaballah has been co-opted and made trendy. I hate hearing things like "Ashton and Demi were married in a Kaballah-style ceremony". I'm like, what the hell is that? Kaballah isn't a religion! That'd be like saying, "Oh, we had a Vacation Bible School-style wedding", I mean, seriously? It doesn't make any sense to me, and, frankly, I think it's so disrespectful to the people who-- according to tradition-- became both Torah and Talmud masters prior to Kaballah study. I mean you devote your whole life to this study and then Madonna and Paris put Kaballah on like a new pair of Blahniks. I can't stand that. If someone wants to convert, by all means. Get thee a Rabbi! But Brittney Spears running around with that Magen David seems trite to me. It makes me want to scream, "She's not my people! That's not how we are! She's not Jewish! I'm not like her! She doesn't represent me!"

I hear it's hip for non-Jewish guys to wear kippot and got to Jewish singles events lately, in order to pick-up Jewish women, which I think is both hilarious and rude. I mean, how different would the world be if we all were just our authentic little selves instead of crap like that? So, things like that feel more like a mockery of us that's probably a side-effect of the trendy-Judaism. Then again, I think maybe Jew Stuff being more on mainstream radar offers some myth-dispelling and maybe is a little bit helpful, at least in a positive way...? Maybe? I say that and I don't even know if I really believe it. I guess the bottom line is that I think there's probably more in the "unforch" column then the "forch", when it comes to this. I mean, VH1 has talking head shows devoted to Jews, Sarah Silverman did the "Give The Jew Girl Toys" song that was so funny, Borat made for great Satire, young non-Jewish Deadheads and Rasta kids are all over Matisyahu, and all of that's positive, but it's tricky (and sometimes awful) to see Jews represented when we're deadling with a religion that's so based in personal choices and practices. I mean, we all "do Jewish" differently, you know? It's nice to see non-Jews enjoying or appreciating our Jew Stuff because that's probably building bridges of some kind ultimately, but it's so uncomfortable when my neighbor asks why I don't wear a "red string bracelet like Madonna's".

All of that said, sure, I think Judaism is very cool. I'm proud to see the world through my own brand of Jewish filters.

Angel-headed hipster: Miles DavisON BEING NORMAN MAILER'S WHITE NEGRO (SORT OF):

Well, I describe myself as an old beatnik. I live less elegantly than my kids do. That's kind of my style—the sort of postwar graduate-student style. But I always liked a lot of stuff about the Beat period and the Beat people. I enjoyed the sexual freedom. I wasn't interested in being gay or bisexual, but I enjoyed the sense that you knew you could go ahead and do it. I didn't take a lot of drugs, but I was happy to smoke a joint now and then. I liked the music. You know, this sounds like a white guy talking about how he likes Miles Davis.

ON BREAKING THE COLOR LINE AT HARPER'S:

My first published story was plucked out of the slush pile at Harper's Bazaar. At that period, they didn't publish people like me. The editor, Mary Louise Aswell, asked me to change my name. I was a student at Columbia at the time, and you know what a thrill to get a story in a national magazine! She suggested that I add a u—that I call myself Herbert Gould, which didn't sound so explicitly Jewish. You know, there are Goulds who are not actually Jewish. Anyway, I agreed to do that because I was young and ambitious. But I came back to my dorm at Columbia feeling incredibly guilty and horrible. I called her the next morning and said I wanted my real name used. And she said, "We don't publish Jewish names in Harper's Bazaar." It wasn't her prejudice; it was company policy. But she was sympathetic with me and said OK. And the story was published in Harper's Bazaar under my real name, in the Christmas issue, which had 400 pages. But it was left out of the table of contents.

The obligatory visionary artist cigarette photo: GinsbergON DRINKING, FUCKING, AND DYING WITH ALLEN GINSBERG:

Once, at a restaurant in Paris, I saw Allen take out and play this funny little instrument. He sang this Buddhist country-rock song that went, "Eat when you eat, drink when you drink, fuck when you fuck, die when you die." There was something comical about his take on life. In fact, I think parts of his poetry that people take seriously are meant as comedy. Of course, he was also very much in earnest about his love life and about his various passions. When Sonny Barger, who was head of the Hell's Angels, sent a telegram to Nixon offering the services of the Angels as guerillas in Vietnam, Allen said he was gonna organize—and this is the phrase he used; I want to quote it exactly—“a disciplined corps of trained fairies to unzip the flies of the Hell’s Angels and blow them into peacefulness.” Well, it was very funny. And at the same time, there was a certain element of seriousness because he thought that if the Hell’s Angels only got good sex, they would relax—it was that kind of humor, what the carnies called “kidding on the square.”

ON TACKLING THE BEAT GENERATION'S DUMB JOCK:

I knew Kerouac through Ginsberg at Columbia when I was a student. When I first saw him, he was just a jock. He was given a football scholarship to Columbia. I don't remember how I first met him, but I know that Allen kept wanting me to be friends with him. Allen was like a mother hen; he wanted all his friends to be friends and he was trying to make us a Kerouac clique. He and I argued about only three things: We argued about his sexuality (not that I objected to his being gay, it was just that he wanted to convert me at that time); we argued about Saint Theresa, whom he followed; and we argued about Kerouac. Kerouac was a creep from the beginning, but I think his antisemitism didn't come out then because he was self-serving. He accepted all the help from Allen that he could. And he and Allen were briefly lovers. Poor guy died at, what was it, 47 or 48, and he was an old man when he died. And his becoming antisemitic developed along with his obesity and his alcoholism and his general falling apart, along with his becoming a right-winger. Remember, he supported the war in Vietnam. And he supported Nixon. I think his mind was pretty much gone.

On the road...to anti-semitism! (Sorry): KerouacON BECOMING A CHOSEN (AKA NICE JEWISH) WRITER:

The ethical standing of being Jewish appeals to me. I think Jews have something special to give. I do accept the idea, not that we're chosen by God to be wonderful, but that Jews have a mission to do certain things which are of virtue in the world and of help in the world. I think it comes down to the fact that heaven is very weak in the Jewish tradition. What happens when we die is we're buried and then when the Messiah comes we all come back to life. But we have to make it on Earth as it is; that's where our work should be done and where we're to enjoy life and where we're to make our memories and experience. It's one of the reasons so many Jews—all over the world but particularly in America—have become novelists. Because what the word novel means is new; a novel is news of the world. And we've had this traditional need to see the world as it is, and to do good for the world.

Apropos of my Chomsky post, Tahl and I were discussing the multiform art of persuasion and who uses what tactic in order to turn a crowd. Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," needs updating. What is one to do about a creature like Noam Chomsky, whose mechanical style and permanent calm seem to many the wardrobe of objectivity and universal moral principles.

With born writers like Martin Amis, it's all about getting the language to out-perform itself at every opportunity. There is no such thing as a synonym, and cliches of expression are insidious for their confirmation of cliches of thought and feeling.

For instance, you can bang on about genocide and mass murder. You can trot out all the old adjectives to describe the gulag or Auschwitz -- "horrific," "nightmarish," "incalculable," "unfathomable" -- but watch what happens to the furniture in your head when you deploy a term like "species shame" to account for events that have been accounted for an, well, "incalculable" number of times already.

Here's a clip of Amis discussing his ongoing war against cliche with Charlie Rose. It's not just instructive. It's quite funny, too.

You Hate Poetry: Based on the boring cover of this book, so do I.

young Jewish poets whose work you might enjoy…

As I said this morning, Jason Schneiderman is hot shit.

Ariel Greenberg’s first book blew me away, and her newest is more than a little Jew-ish.

Dan Beachy-Quick is (like me) from an intermarried home and does not always identify himself as Jewish, but I’d be remiss if I left him off the list. He’s brilliant and his work reflects the kind of philosophical thought that touches my faith-bone.

Josh Corey is smart as hell, and is blogging today about Jewish poetry (and several of the other poets mentioned here… which will give you a sense for just how small the poetry-world is)

Sabrina Orah Mark writes intense, strange poems. I love them.

And of course, there are a kazillion other people I should include, but I’m supposed to keep these posts short…

I should say that though none of these people confine themselves to Jewish subject matter, they are all Jewish writers. (If I want to learn about the immigrant experience or kosher cooking, I’ll read fiction or nonfiction).

But not poetry… in poetry that kind of “subject feels wrong to me. It feels too heavy, like a caricature. In poetry I look instead for a subtle touch of faith, a vague context of culture. I want to be challenged and inspired by poetry… to learn and think and develop ideas about language and the metaphysical or spiritualor mechanical or logical/legal aspects of the world (which can absolutely be Jewish). I want to find myself approaching belief from odd angles.

I want the inner workings of things. Not descriptions I’ve heard before.

(Full disclosure: some of these people are people I know, but it’s a teeny-tiny world, poetry-land)

New Voices: Maybe you've got oneI’ve noticed lately that this blog is receiving a lot of really funny, eloquent, well-written comments. And I’ve also noticed that several of our more regular readers are younger than me, and still in school. So it only seems right that I link New Voices, in case people don’t already know about it.

And just what IS New Voices? Well, besides being one of the best Jewish magazines around (no kidding)…

New Voices is America's only national magazine written by and for Jewish college students. Published since 1991 by the independent, non-profit, student-run Jewish Student Press Service, New Voices is read by over 26,000 students on over 400 campuses across the United States and abroad.

Certainly, our oh-so-writerly college-age commenters should submit something to NV, and certainly NV would be thrilled to hear from our Jewcy clan. (submission guidelines are here)

Not just because it’s a chance to network. But also because writing about a Jewish topic is the best way I know of working through that topic, thinking about the subject matter in new ways, researching new angles and other people’s perspectives.

Like someone very wise once said to me (probably quoting someone even wiser)… writing is the best way to figure out what you didn’t know you knew.