Adina Hoffman— Ben Hecht was always falling in love—though he never tumbled harder and faster into that ecstatic state than he did when he met Chicago. “The city of my first manhood,” he called it. The place enthralled him with its blur of rooftops and chimneys, its signage and streetcars,
Adina Hoffman— Ben Hecht was “a genius,” Jean-Luc Godard declared in 1968. “He invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” He “wrote stories—and he made history,” proclaimed Menachem Begin four years earlier, at Hecht’s standing room-only Manhattan funeral. When Hecht was still alive, and invariably kicking,
A look at the life of Ben Hecht, screenwriter, reporter, playwright, novelist, and Jewish activist whose influence is still felt today. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | Soundcloud
Listen to Peter Cole Reading from The Poetry of Kabbalah Each Day Nut Garden In an interview with Ready Steady Book, poet and translator Peter Cole reflected on the medieval Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, remarking that he was attracted by “the notion of beauty it embodies…and its potency
On October 2, 2011, the world bid farewell to Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, whose powerful works resonated with the tone of loss in the twentieth century. Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya, itself lost in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Muhammad Ali was an unlikely picture of
Adina Hoffman’s biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Al, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, is not a love story. Instead, it is a story of loss and how from that loss Taha has created art. Amira became a “muse” in Taha’s work, a symbol of everything his family lost when they became refugees; indeed, it was everything.
Earlier this month the UK publication Jewish Quarterly awarded Adina Hoffman with the Wingate Prize 2010 for her new book, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. Given out annually to an author whose work “stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader,” this