Join Natania Rosenfeld for a 6-week ONLINE course where participants will engage with a different artist/writer every week and make short diary entries inspired by each one; sharing those entries, we’ll consider what action, however small, might arise from them: action to help keep ourselves and each other safe and to resist forces that threaten to crush our spirits and our persons.
Rather than proposing to debate or define fraught concepts or settle current disputes, we will explore the work of some extremely sensitive, deep thinkers: a diarist, an artist, a sociologist, a poet and a prose writer, all from the first half of the twentieth century, who confronted anti-Semitism before and during the Holocaust. How did they find their way; how did they imagine the Jewish plight; how did they express defiance, and perhaps widen for us that gesher tzar m’od, the terribly narrow bridge we all struggle to cross? Let’s strengthen ourselves, taking courage from our artistic forbears.
Alongside these readings and writings, there will be one more, recommended book: Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident, which was part of the inspiration for this course.
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ABOUT NATANIA:
Natania Rosenfeld is a writer, independent scholar and Professor Emerita of English.
She published my second poetry collection in 2021: The Blue Bed (Spuyten Duyvil). Natania’s first book of poetry, Wild Domestic was published in 2015 (Sheep Meadow Press). She also published a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton, 2000), and a chapbook of essays, She and I (Essay Press, May 2018). Her essays, poems and fiction are forthcoming or have appeared in journals including AGNI, Yale Review, APR, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner and Southwest Review, and four essays have been listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays collections. In 2018, Natania was named one of 30 “Writers to Watch” by the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago, where she lived from 2018 to 2022. Natania currently lives in the Hudson Valley where she teaches literature courses for adults through the Newberry Library and the Graham School at the University of Chicago.