Joseph Zitt's blog

In a new post to her blog Five Feet Above Water, poet (and friend of Tiferet) Carly Sachs points to a good article by Randi Sherman in New York Jewish Week, "A New Take On Text Messages," on some exciting art work being done by Jewish women studying at the Drisha Institute in New York.

An idea just hit me for a work comparing experiences of a variety of more-or-less contemporary exiles, as inspired by the article in the previous post:

In this article, "Letter From an Israeli Soldier," an Israeli soldier writes of her feelings, years after participating in the evacuation and removal of a settlement. Political issues aside, this moving piece shows one of the emotional aspects of a particular Jewish experience, touching on issues of personal and communal responsibility, the sense of guilt, and aspects of exile even for some within Israel.

(Found via a post to the Vos Iz Neias (Yiddish: What's News?) blog.)

A link from one of my favorite blogs, The Jew and the Carrot, points to an article in the Washington Post about growing crops in urban areas. One surprising datum from the article: "George Ball, chairman of W. Atlee Burpee, the country's largest seed company, said he has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in vegetable seed sales this year."

In a new post at his blog, "Toto", one of my favorite Jewish writers, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, post provocatvely (as usual) that "Judaism is dying." He runs down what he sees as the failures of the Rabbinic, Zionist, Humanistic, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Jewish Renewal, and Orthodox Movements.

But he does hold out some hope:

Some initial reactions to the Getting Started post:

Carly Sachs, who has been in the conversations leading up to the formation of the Tiferet Artists Collective, has a good essay draft on her blog on "Life as a Jewish Writer or a Writerly Jew."

Looking at a page in a book referencing kabbalah (though not directly about it) on Wednesday, I read the Hebrew text on a page, trying to figure out what it was. I eventually recalled that the text was from the Sefer Yetzirah". The sounds of the text were quite appealing.

Yishai suggested that I read Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. These closing paragraphs stood out for me with respect to the beginning of our project:

A brief dream while I dozed at a Berkeley bookstore this afternoon (it had been too short a night, since I was up late getting this site running, then woke up after too few hours to feed the cats and parrots and to call my mother on her birthday) in the midst of leafing through Buber's Between Man and Man: