Poetry Talk
Can a Poem be Jewish?
Panel discussion with poets Judy Halebsky, Ariel Resnikoff, and Matthew Zapruder
2:00 pm | Seminar Room
Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 3, 2026
at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Can a poem be Jewish? If so, what makes it Jewish? Must one be Jewish to write a Jewish poem? In what ways (if any) has the relationship of Jewish poets to the poetry they write, read, and publish shifted in recent years in relation to the ongoing geopolitical turmoil unfolding in the Middle East? Three accomplished poets will read from their work and engage in conversation around these and other questions, reflecting on the stakes of Jewishness in contemporary writing and on their own experiences of being Jewish poets in the world today.
About Judy Halebsky
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, including Sky=Empty which won the New Issues Prize. With Ayako Takahashi, she translated Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi.
Her honors include fellowships from MacDowell, Millay, and the Japanese Ministry of Culture. At Dominican University of California, she teaches Japanese literature, poetry, and live storytelling. She lives in Berkeley with her nature guide and young daughter.
Photo Credit: Cindi Stephan
Spring and a Thousand Years
A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.
Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.
The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.
About Ariel Resnikoff
Ariel Resnikoff’s recent works include raisin in every bite (Furniture Press, 2022), A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021), and Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), which was awarded an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize. He is also the co-editor of In Between, Keep Moving: A Pierre Joris Reader (Contra Mundum, forthcoming 2026). Ariel is a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry and prose, and his own writing has been translated into numerous languages—most recently, Russian and Mandarin. He is a contributing editor at Jacket2 magazine and a member of the Board of Directors of Ether Sea Projects and Litmus Press. His newest poetry collection, Poems with Friends & Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press in Spring 2027.
Photo Credit: Riv Weinstock
Unnatural Bird Migrator
Ariel Resnikoff’s Unnatural Bird Migrator stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse, a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. ‘UNBM’ traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile, looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the “other side” of the linguistic threshold already changed. This translinguistic praxis explores writing as a mode of perpetual displacement, translating language in wide spirals outward to the farthest edges of the sonic/semantic divide, while gleaning materials for a poetics from even the minutest residues left behind. Resnikoff’s compositional method engages by (mis)translation in/to Yiddish-, Hebrew-, Aramaic- and Akkadian- adapted sonic/semantic properties in grammar, syntax and lexicon, taking English as its temporary “host” while performing perpetual inflectional slippages—interlingual punning and fusion-slangs—as much as the “host” can absorb. The dybbuk (Yiddish: spirit-possessor), which the author’s Jewish-Ashkenazi ancestors believed to inhabit the body of the wild stutterer, mad person, heretic or “akher” [lit. other], becomes the peripheral focus of this poetry, as Resnikoff reimagines the ways in which such a “possession” by language itself might manifest in the ”odd” practices of the poet, translator and Jew. The word “odd” here functions in deliberate echo of the terms against which Sabbatean stigma was first transcribed in 17th-century Palestine: “for the odd practices of a false messiah.”
About Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of the poetry collections I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024), and How to Continue (The Economy Press, 2025). His previous books also include Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, and plays music with The Figments and We Are Leaves.
Photo Credit: B.A. Van Sise
I Love Hearing Your Dreams
From one of contemporary poetry’s most playful and original minds, an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century hopes and disillusions.
“Your dreams
have no hidden
agenda to be wise
they are made
to be forgotten
so something
can be known”
I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of “the last time that things were real” and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one” and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.” Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be.
From a poet celebrated for his “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture” (The New York Times), I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a startlingly beautiful and deeply vulnerable book where lives journey into a mystifying place and emerge transformed.