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Jewish Poetry Project of Ben Yehuda Press
@jpoetryproject.bsky.social
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jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Celebrate Jewish Book Month with our buy more, save more Jewish Book Month sale.
Save 20% on 1 book, 30% on 2-3, and 40% on 4 or more. Free shipping on orders over $25. Remember: Hanukkah is coming!

Ben Yehuda Press Jewish Book Month sale: Save 20% on 1 book, 30% on 2-3, and 40% on 4 or more. Free shipping on orders over $25.
November 28, 2025 at 7:42 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Join us this afternoon at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer

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Jewish Poetry with Ben Yehuda Press
A Poetry Reading and Conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer
www.eventbrite.com
November 2, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Join us Sunday at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer, featuring new volumes focusing on the post-10/7 Diaspora experience and the life of Ariel Sharon

October 30, 2025 at 4:25 PM
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Join us Sunday at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer

Sign up at
Jewish Poetry with Ben Yehuda Press
A Poetry Reading and Conversation featuring Atar Hadari, Matthew Lippman, & Maxim D. Shrayer
www.eventbrite.com
October 30, 2025 at 4:22 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Join us this afternoon at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Genevieve Greinetz, Baruch November, & Donna Spruijt-Metz.

Sign up at
Jewish Poetry with Ben Yehuda Press
featuring Genevieve Greinetz, Baruch November, & Donna Spruijt-Metz
www.eventbrite.com
October 26, 2025 at 4:25 PM
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Join us Sunday, 10/26, at 3 pm Eastern for an online poetry reading and conversation featuring Genevieve Greinetz, Baruch November, & Donna Spruijt-Metz.

Sign up at
Jewish Poetry with Ben Yehuda Press
featuring Genevieve Greinetz, Baruch November, & Donna Spruijt-Metz
www.eventbrite.com
October 23, 2025 at 3:20 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Our Simchat Torah sale is underway. Save 25% on all our parsha titles: prose, poetry, and pictures; the serious, the silly, and the interactive. www.benyehudapress.c...
Save 25% during our Simchat Torah sale. Serious, silly, and interactive Torah companions. Save on parsha poetry, prose, and pictures.
October 10, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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Two new timely books of poetry. "King of the Jews" by Matthew Lippman captures the experience of mourning for 10/7 and fearing for the fate of the hostages from abroad.
New Poetry Titles Out This Month “How does one respond to the terror of Oct 7? For Matthew Lippman, it’s through poetry. In King of the Jews, Lippman names many who perished, were kidnapped, held hostage. He names friends, students, rock stars, too. Lippman honors—and loves—them all. He even anoints them king, King of the Jews. These poems hold the beauty and the horror of the world and the deep longing, living within Lippman’s naked, aching heart.” — Diane Gottlieb “Atar Hadari’s extraordinary book Arik & Co. reads like a masterly biography magically transformed into vital poetry. Was Ariel Sharon a hero? Was he a monster? The force of a strong and twisting narrative spine, fleshed out in earthy interior monologs and dialogues, brings both the man and the era to inescapable life.” — Alicia Ostriker
September 16, 2025 at 5:00 PM
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A New Year is dawning, may it be for the good, and with it lengthy synagogue stays. Now is the time to pick up shul reading, so we're running a sale: Save 20% on one book, 30% on two or three, and 40% on four or more.
Ben Yehuda Press Back-To-Shul sale with savings of up to 40%
September 11, 2025 at 8:57 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Continuing our series of bilingual poetry translations, "Wu Wei Eats an Egg" presents Dutch poet Lucas Hirsch in English carefully rendered by Donna Spruijt-Metz.

*Wu wei eats an egg*

What always was, is, and will be
cracks an egg
on the edge
of a frying pan

Acts according to the nature
Cover of Wu Wei Eats an Egg “Alternatingly enraged at and bemused by the 21st century, with its traps of bourgeois excess, addiction, and ‘hollow language,’ Hirsch regularly explores the interior self, familial history, and the physical world.” —Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood Wu wei eats an egg What always was, is, and will be cracks an egg on the edge of a frying pan Acts according to the nature of the beast It makes breakfast, the cosmos and planets the tumbling sun It laughs at all there is It eats an egg under the heavens It fills its belly It sits back in a chair on the veranda of a house in a country under the clouds looking at creation floating by
September 2, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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Just published: "Zion Square," the new poetry collection from Maxim D. Shrayer. Available direct from Ben Yehuda Press and the usual places.

*Zion Square*

In the earthly city of Jerusalem I like to stay
just a couple of blocks from Kikar HaMusica
in Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street, a pathway
Cover of "Zion Square" by Maxim D. Shrayer Orchestras played outside my hotel at night and I listened to the music Jews couldn’t leave in Europe. I felt sheltered by the might of the Iron Dome but also the roof of particolored umbrellas that hang over the street—once the prey of tourist photos and travel agents’ brochures, now the sky of our small warring country. I looked up and cried for all my cousins-in-arms but also for myself. Mostly tears of joy and comfort. Music didn’t end suddenly, it flowed up toward Jaffa Street and I felt someone or something carry me, a Jewish feather, to Kikar Tsiyon. The memories Maxim Shrayer carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. Poems born since October 7, poems of Israel and the old Soviet Union, an imagination that can bring Nabokov to size up Putin, but can also relish the sweetness of concord grapes in Massachusetts. These are poems to savor and to learn. —Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
August 28, 2025 at 6:36 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Just published: "The Broken Heart is the Master Key," the new poetry collection from Baruch November (@bnovember). Introduction by Alicia Ostriker. Available direct from Ben Yehuda Press and the usual places.
“God works through the fires in the collec­tion, inviting us to reflect on our own spir­i­tu­al journeys… these poems … are coura­geous and vulner­a­ble, unlock­ing painful and uplift­ing truths.” —Jewish Book Council The broken heart is the master key, said the Baal Shem Tov. Despair is the loudest language in all worlds.   Ask the mother of the stolen seven-year-old girl. Ask the widowed wives still in love. Ask the newly dead as they look down. Ask the soldier missing both arms. The broken heart is the master key, said the Chassidic master to the shofar blower who lost his page of mystical notations & thought he had failed his task—   having blasted notes like a simple, broken man. I have been an inept architect. I built for one who does not live with the truth of others. I built for starlight, not shelter. —Baruch November
August 26, 2025 at 6:53 PM
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We are proud to be launching three new poetry titles this month:

Wu Wei Eats an Egg by Lucas Hirsch, translated from the Dutch by @dsmpoet.bsky.social

The Broken Heart is the Master Key by Baruch November

Zion Square, by Maxim D. Shrayer
3 New Poetry Titles Out This Month! Zion Square by Maxim D. Shrayer: “Maxim D. Shrayer’s voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure.” —David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love Wu Wei Eats an Egg by Lucas Hirsch: “Alternatingly enraged at and bemused by the 21st century, with its traps of bourgeois excess, addiction, and ‘hollow language,’ Hirsch regularly explores the interior self, familial history, and the physical world.” —Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood The Broken Heart is the Master Key by Baruch November: “God works through the fires in the collec­tion, inviting us to reflect on our own spir­i­tu­al journeys… these poems … are coura­geous and vulnera­ble, unlock­ing painful and uplift­ing truths.” —Jewish Book Council
August 12, 2025 at 2:14 PM
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Vanessa De Loya Stauber's POÉSIE ORGANIQUE / ORGANIC POETRY is one of our latest poetry releases. You can order it now!

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Vanessa de Loya Stauber writes about the gift she found later in life: A passionate, tender, and loving union that binds hesr to her husband — and to Jerusalem. These erotic poems are imbued with a sense of gratitude and commitment, to the promises they made to each other, and to the promise that comes with choosing to live in a holy land. They exude the bountiful fragrances and colors of the place they now call home: Israel — azure like the sky and white as the jasmine flower. A song to the love of her life, “Organic Poetry” is a testament to sacred sensuousness, to discovering happiness and holding on to it like to dear life. In the words of the poet herself: “My poetry slips between the splinters of life and its untimely joys.”
July 1, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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Noah Berlatsky's 1st collection of poetry, *Not Akhmatova* is a collection of quasi translations, appropriations, and arguments with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in the context of Jewish diaspora.

Order here: www.amazon.com/Not-A...
Lot’s Wife (as translated by Noah Berlatsky) The righteous man followed God’s messenger, huge and terrible, like a black mountain. His great back to Lot’s wife was sorrow and fear. She longed to stop and see just once again the white spires of her home, the place in the square where she sang to her children. The windows of the house where in joy and pain she gave birth to her children. And so she turned back, for one last sight. Her eyes like those windows were empty. Her body was a pillar of salt, bleached white. Her feet were rooted in place, like a memory. We aren’t supposed to mourn her. She’s a fool, and so many others burned. They say do not look towards her who defied God, and turned.
June 30, 2025 at 2:11 PM
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A little thread of music by Jewish-American guitarist Marc Ribot, starting with his classic "Yo! I Killed Your God"

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Yo! I Killed Your God
Provided to YouTube by Redeye Worldwide Yo! I Killed Your God · Marc Ribot Yo! I Killed Your God ℗ 1999 Tzadik Released on: 1999-05-18 Main Artist: Marc Ribot Composer: Marc Ribot Auto-generated by YouTube.
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June 29, 2025 at 3:01 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Sally Priesand, the first ordained American woman rabbi, was born on this day in 1946. She's one of our HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH!

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digital illustration showing a tween girl from the back with long hair looking at a portrait of Priesand on a wall in a gold frame; Priesand is a young woman in glasses; a torah scroll is beside her
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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The JBI (former Jewish Braille Institute) has sponsored audio recordings of two Jewish Poetry Project titles: Rodger Kamenetz's THE MISSING JEW and Maya Bernstein's NO PLACE WITHOUT YOU.

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cover of NO PLACE WITHOUT YOU cover image is photo of a very old, closed blue arched door; looks like it dates from ancient times
June 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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A poem for sunday by Jewish-American poet Hadara Bar-Nadav .
Lullaby (with Exit Sign) Hadara Bar-Nadav I slept with all four hooves in the air or I slept like a snail in my broken shell. The periphery of the world dissolved. A giant exit sign blinking above my head. My family sings its death march. They are the size of the moon. No, they are the size of thumbtacks punched through the sky’s eyelid. What beauty, what bruise. What strange lullaby is this that sings from its wound?) Here, my dead father knocks on a little paper door. Here, my family knocks, waits. Come through me, my darlings, whatever you are: flame, lampshade, soap. Leave your shattered shadows behind. I’ll be the doorway that watches you go.
June 22, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
R. B. Lemberg's EVERYTHING THAWS is a poetric cycle and memoir "suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Siberia, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family."

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When I came back to Ukraine after a year in Vorkuta I drew the northern lights to show my classmates. I drew myself dragging a little sleigh, head up to the vast shimmering road in the sky. It was my road that showed me the way when I was six – white, wide, stretching across the black winter sky in complete silence, under the immovable permanence of the cold. “You’re lying,” my classmates yelled, and later the whole class trapped me in the school attic and beat me, screaming that I was a Jew who believed in G-d (remember, these were Soviet times and believing in G-d was forbidden) and that I was lying about the northern lights I saw in Vorkuta. They had never seen the Northern lights, but they knew what a Jew looked like.
June 20, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jpoetryproject.bsky.social
Ilya Gutner's book of poems WALKING TRIPTYCHS: SHANGHAI POEMS is a series of poems written walking around Shanghai and thinking about the Holocaust and its legacy.
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What These Poems Are These are poems from when I walked about Shanghai and thought about the meaning of the Holocaust. Why did I think about the meaning of the Holocaust? That is answered by what brought me to China in the first place. What brought me to China? Only the encounter with the plain reality that in the West the Nazis really won, under a hundred different names. Theirs was not a unitary thought. Gathering my own thoughts in a unity, I came to the conclusion that it does not matter if they won or not. No evil had been done except if we forget the evil. Why do we forget the evil? Because if I forget the evil which is at the roots of my life, it is easier to think that the temporary pleasures and worries that my life is filled with, are important. So that I can go and love myself, and not like other people, under a hundred different names, forgetting the simple meaning of the one name I was born with: Human.
June 18, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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Attached is the poem "Today" by Rosa Nevadovska (1890-1971), translated by Merle L. Bachman from the Yiddish.

Bachman's translation of Nevadovska's poems, *So Many Warm Words* is published by Ben Yehuda Press in a bilingual translation.

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Today I wander up and down the streets. Distant people feel close: I carry your words with me, from your poem — its slender flame. My heart is open. Today, in silence, I want to bless — Earth, waters, forests — along with you and me.
June 17, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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Billy Joel, one of the most successful Jewish poets/songwriters of the past decades, has announced he is ill and is no longer planning to tour. Thought we'd do a short thread in tribute.

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Billy Joel - Piano Man (Original Video)
Original Music Video for "Piano Man" by Billy Joel Listen to Billy Joel: https://billyjoel.lnk.to/listenYD Subscribe to the Billy Joel YouTube Channel: https://billyjoel.lnk.to/subscribe Follow Billy Joel: Facebook: https://billyjoel.lnk.to/followFI Instagram: https://billyjoel.lnk.
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June 15, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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Lori Levy's poetry collection *Feet In L.A., But My Womb Lives In Jerusalem, My Breath In Vermont* merges nostalgia and carpe diem as she recalls important stations of her journeys between Vermont, Israel, and California.

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About this book What more could I ask for than a chair at your bright yellow table, high as clear skies, pine trees, and the dusty red roofs of Jerusalem. Lori Levy’s delicate poems oscillate vividly between the sensation of dayenu-moments, when we feel perfectly whole and at peace —and our craving to experience more: more of this life, again, more of this place, or another place, of another moment. Levy merges nostalgia and carpe diem as she recalls important stations of her journeys between Vermont, Israel, and California. To love means to know well: a person, a place, a specific shade of light at a precise hour of the day, the taste of her mother-in-law’s kubeh dish. As we follow Levy’s memories of her longings, joys, and loves we are reminded of how we can find permanence in every impermanent moment, savored in the present.
June 11, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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Children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak was born on this date in 1928. He's one of our HEROES WITH CHUTZPAH!

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WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE cover, illustration shows a boat approaching a forested island with a sleeping monster
June 10, 2025 at 2:02 PM