A01=Wendy I. Zierler
Amir Gilboa
Author_Wendy I. Zierler
Avraham ?alfi
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Category=QRJP
Creative Works
Culture
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Feminism and Judaism
grief
Hebrew literature
Hebrew memoir
Hebrew poetry
Hebrew poets
Jewish educators
Jewish feminism
Jewish feminists
Jewish History &
Jewish Liturgy
Jewish living
Jewish memoir
Jewish poetry
Jewish studies
Jewish theology
Jewish tradition
Kaddish
Lea Goldberg
memoir
Modern Hebrew culture
Modern Hebrew Literature
Modern Hebrew Poetry
Modern Jewish thought
modern Orthodox judaism
mourning
personal loss
poetry
poetry collection
rabbis
Rachel Bluwstein
Rachel Morpurgo
Ruhama Weiss
theology
Torah
translated poetry
Yehuda Amichai
Product details
- ISBN 9780827615700
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots illuminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss.
She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet-Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa-in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too.
Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah.
She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet-Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa-in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too.
Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah.
Wendy I. Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and the coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation and And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing and coeditor of These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness.
