The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Can I Hold Both? A Two Voice Poem on the Current War
by Jessica Genia Simon
An Israeli Father to His Dead Son
Boker tov, ben sheli (Good morning, my son)
said the father to his son.
The gravestone, quiet in its repose
stands at attention nonetheless.
The father says, Dudi, hello, your parents
are waiting for you at home.
The conversation is over for today.
A Palestinian Father and His Dead Daughter
Is there an inch of Gaza that is not a cemetery?
There is no stone uncracked for the gravestone,
no inch unbombed for a grave.
A father stands in a bombed out
doorway remembering his daughter
on pink roller skates
before shrapnel sliced her throat. Now, there is
no door, no girl, no grave.
A Walk Across Campus as a “Jew in Solitude”
by Jessica Genia Simon
2004 -2024
“What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
– Adrienne Rich, “Yom Kippur 1984”
I could not tell Adrienne how not
to feel lonely or afraid far from your own.
Back in 2004, I squeezed a honey packet
onto a bitten dorm cafeteria apple
to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year).
An article about dead Israelis
and Palestinians stuffed in my backpack
a prayer on my lips mouthed into a shared
bathroom mirror, Kol Nid
ray
ay
hummed on Erev Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).
Now, splashed across front pages
campus protesters gather
some wear keffiyehs, some kippot
they’re arrested, silenced, suspended.
There is no space for the student
who lives in the in-between, weeping
all losses, all lives
on a college campus that contracts
like an aortic valve shut tight.
Blood can only pump
to this chamber or that chamber.
I hope they find (like I did, twenty years ago
during another war) other misfits
to bicker with
to make clumsy like love to
on a dorm room twin bed
someone they can wave to
common threads like tassels in the wind.
For the Jewish Queers
by Jessica Genia Simon
Yes, it’s true. I am a Jew, and proud to be a queer one.
because if you ask me about identity, don’t expect to hear just one.
Jewish heritage I feel lucky, unlucky, lucky to have.
something my mother is, my father is, my grandparents were,
something my mother’s mother suffered; six, seven siblings gone,
without a trace, not a picture left of a face.
I am Jewish because I am a student of history,
I have grandparents who survived to create my mother for me,
Queer Jew, the connection is not so hard to find.
read Paragraph 175; the queers were among the first to die,
along with the communists, the mentally ill, the blind.
They came for so many others before they came for the Jews
Nazis did not care about identities you did or didn’t choose
And this is as much a part of me as much as desire for whoever attracts me.
So you cannot ask me to pick one, or ditch one; I don’t have that luxury.
Why am I a Jewish queer?
So on my 26th birthday, I could read Leviticus 18:22
in the biblical Hebrew
and explain to you that in the language of its writing
the word abomination has a connotation of ritual deviation
not condemnation, and that the translation is an interpretation
the interpretation is a conversation because the same word
is used twenty-six times in the five books of Moses
and also applies to eating lobster, but you don’t see picket lines
of signs that read “God hates lobster eaters.”
What is to lose and what is to save?
Destroy a language and culture to make a slave.
Kill the babes, arrest the resistance and pass the blame.
And so goes humanity, culture, language then the soul.
When there is nothing that survives; there is no story to be told.
I sought wisdom and grew reverence for any things that survived.
Any text that made it through the history of time we call civilized.
Whether a Dead Sea scroll or a Hasidic story re-told
This is the revenge over those who seek to eliminate a people whole.
Truth grows deeper than the seed of a root of a word or a family tree.
I won’t walk away from a whole history because some parts offend me,
I will learn them like lyrics, then switch up the rhymes and the melody.
Teacher didn’t tell you? Interpretation is not blasphemy; it’s necessity.
Watch a recording of Jessica reading this poem from Capturing Fire Poetry Slam
Jessica Genia Simon began writing poetry at age seven. Her poems have been published in many journals including the Atlanta Review and Super Stoked: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from the Capturing Fire Slam & Summit.
She earned a B.A. in English and Textual Studies and Policy Studies at Syracuse University, where she hosted poetry slams and workshops on and off campus. Upon graduation, she joined Teach for America and taught High School English in North Philadelphia while earning her M.S. in Education from University of Pennsylvania. Then, she spent a year in Jerusalem, Israel studying Bible, Mishnah, Talmud at Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, while volunteering with LGBTQ+ and middle east peace
organizations.
She works at a gun violence prevention nonprofit in D.C. and lives with her wife and daughter in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her first poetry collection Built of All I Shape and Name is available now from Kelsay Books at kelsaybooks.com. The poem “Even After” in this collection was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Featured image in this post: 2024 Columbia pro-Palestine protest 23, SWinxy, Columbia University, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
