Marcia Falk | |
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 Poet, author, artist and Judaic scholar Marcia Falk | |
| Born | 1946 New York City |
| Education | Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Brandeis University (BA in Philosophy); Stanford University (Ph.D. in English and comparative literature); Hebrew University (Fulbright Scholar in Bible and Hebrew literature) |
| Spouse | Steven Jay Rood |
| Website | |
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Marcia Falk is a poet, liturgist, painter, and translator who has written several books of poetry and prayer.
She was born in New York City and grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in New Hyde Park, Long Island. Her mother Frieda Goldberg Falk, a teacher, spoke Yiddish fluently and attended Hebrew school as a child at her Orthodox synagogue, the only girl to do so. Her mother's influence helped inspire Falk's feminist spiritual vision and commitment to women's religious education. [1]
Falk took classes as an adolescent in Hebrew and Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She was awarded a B.A. in philosophy magna cum laude from Brandeis University, followed by a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Stanford University. Falk was a Fulbright Scholar in Hebrew and Bible literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and returned four years later as a Postdoctoral Fellow. [1]
As a university professor, Falk taught Hebrew and English literature, Jewish studies and creative writing at Stanford University, Binghamton University, and the Claremont Colleges. In 2001 she was the Priesand Visiting Professor of Jewish Women’s Studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. [2]
Falk is a life member of the Art Students League of New York, where she studied painting as a child and adolescent. Her painting "Gilead Apples" was used as the cover illustration for her book The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season. [3] She has also created a series of mizrachs featuring oil pastel paintings accompanied by texts from her volume of Hebrew and English prayers, The Book of Blessings. [4]
Falk’s poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review , Choice, Moment, Poet & Critic, Poetry Society of America Magazine, Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters (Beacon Press, 1994), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press, 2002), Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (Avon Books, 1980), Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), and many other magazines and anthologies. [1] She has published three collections of her own poems: My Son Likes Weather,This Year in Jerusalem, and It Is July in Virginia. Falk is also the author of The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda, a volume of translations of the Hebrew poetry of twentieth-century mystic Zelda Schneerson Mishkovsky, and "With Teeth in the Earth: Selected Poems of Malka Heifetz Tussman."
The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible, a classic verse translation of the biblical Song of Songs, was first published in 1977. The poet Adrienne Rich called her translation "a beautiful and sensual poem in its own right." [5]
1996's The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival was acclaimed for its nongendered depictions of the divine, replacing traditional masculine terminology for God (i.e., Lord and King) with what Falk calls "new images for divinity." [6] Writing in The Women's Review of Books, Judith Plaskow hailed the book's "extraordinarily beautiful prayers," which use "no female images and little feminine grammar. Instead, [Falk] evokes the sacred as totally immanent in creation, offering an alternative to the whole notion of God as male or female person." [7]
The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season, published in 2014, takes a similar approach to the High Holy Day season, recreating the holidays’ key prayers and rituals from an inclusive perspective. Rabbi David Teutsch of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College praised the author for demonstrating "a poet’s gift for words that open inner vistas, a liturgist’s capacity to speak to the universal, a scholar’s insight into Jewish traditions and texts, and a contemporary feminist’s fresh vision." [8]
She published Inner East: Illuminated Poems and Blessings in 2019. In Inner East, Falk’s poems and blessings are paired with her paintings, as they are in her mizrachs. Traditionally, in Jewish communities west of the Holy Land, mizrachs are hung on an eastern wall to indicate the direction to face during prayer. “Inner east” refers to a direction of the heart, a pointer toward the spiritual core within ourselves.
In 2022, Falk published Night of Beginnings: A Passover Haggadah, the third publication in a series of feminist rewritings of Jewish liturgy. [9]
Falk lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, the poet Steven Jay Rood; they have one son, Abraham Gilead Falk-Rood. [1]
The Passover Seder is a ritual feast at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is conducted throughout the world on the eve of the 15th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. The day falls in late March or in April of the Gregorian calendar. Passover lasts for seven days in Israel and, among most customs, eight days in the Jewish diaspora. Where seven days of Passover are observed, a seder is held on the first night; where eight days are observed, seders are often held on the first two nights, the 15th and 16th of Nisan. The Seder is a ritual involving a retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt, taken from the Book of Exodus in the Torah. The Seder itself is based on the Biblical verse commanding Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt: "You shall tell your child on that day, saying, 'It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.'" At the seder, Jews read the text of the Haggadah, an ancient Tannaitic work. The Haggadah contains the narrative of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, special blessings and rituals, Talmudic commentaries, and Passover songs.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Dahlia Ravikovitch was an Israeli poet, translator and recipient of the Israel Prize for Poetry in 1998.
Marge Piercy is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Marxist social and political activism, and feminist ideals.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Yona Wallach was an Israeli poet. Her surname also appears as Volach. She is considered a revolutionary Israeli feminist and post-modernist.
Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, widely known as Zelda, was an Israeli poet. She received three awards for her published works.
Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.
Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
Fay Zwicky was an Australian poet, short story writer, critic and academic primarily known for her autobiographical poem Kaddish, which deals with her identity as a Jewish writer.
Galit Hasan-Rokem is the Max and Margarethe Grunwald professor of folklore at the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author and editor of numerous works, including co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Folklore (2012), her research interests include proverbs, folklore and culture of the Middle East, and folklore genres and narratives. She is also a published poet and translator of poetry, and a Pro-Palestinian activist. The Jerusalem Post has called her "a figure of some prominence in Jerusalem intellectual circles".
Yannai was an important payyetan who lived in the late fifth-early sixth century in the Galilee in Israel. Sometimes referred to as the "father of piyyut," his poetry marks the beginning of the Classical Period of piyyut that ranged from the fifth-eighth centuries. He was the first poet of piyyut to sign his name in an acrostic, to use end-rhyme, and to write for weekly services. According to Laura Lieber, the liturgical form most associated with Yannai is the qedushta, which embellishes the first 3 blessing of the Amidah.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Rachel Tzvia Back is an English-language American-Israeli poet, translator and professor of literature.
Louisa Calio is an American poet, writer, multimedia performance artist and teacher. She has directed the Poets and Writers' Piazza for Hofstra University's Italian Experience for the past 10 years. Calio's writings have appeared internationally in anthologies, magazines and journals. She has been honored by Barnard College, Columbia University as a Feminist Who Changed America Second Wave 1963–1975. She has traveled to East and West Africa, lived in the Caribbean and documented her journeys in photographs and the written word, completing an epic poem "Journey to the Heart Waters" which was also the title of an exhibition of photos and poems that opened at Round Hill Resort in Montego Bay in 2007.
Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim was a Lithuanian-born Israeli Yiddish poet and educator. She was the recipient of the Itzik Manger Prize in 1984. Basman was also awarded the Chaim Zhitlowsky Prize in 1998.
Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo was a Jewish-Italian poet. She is said to be the first Jewish woman to write poetry in Hebrew under her own name in two thousand years.
Michal Govrin is an Israeli author, poet and theater director.
Bracha Serri was an Israeli poet, recipient of the Prime Minister's Literature Award for 1990.
Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.
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