This series showcases the diversity of poetic voices from Israel/Palestine through the lens of translation. Each event features a multilingual poetry reading and a conversation between poets and translators on the careful negotiations that are involved in the act of translation, highlighting work that creates its own currents against and beyond the Israeli mainstream.

Rita Kogan is a feminist poet and translator in Israel, producing original verse in Hebrew and translations from her native Russian. Born in Leningrad in 1976 and immigrating to Israel in 1990, Kogan explores the challenges that Russian-speaking women encounter in their daily life in Israel, including ethnic discrimination, sexual abuse, and the difficulty of expressing sexuality in a patriarchal society. In her poems, we also encounter a poet full of joie-de-vivre, one who revels in love and literature. She is the author of Rishayon li-shegiot ketiv (License to Misspell, 2015) and Sus bahatzait (Horse in a Skirt, 2018), a runner-up for the prestigious Gardner Simon Prize for Hebrew poetry, and translator of works by Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and others.

Alex Moshkin is a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His book project, Russophone Culture in Israel: In Search of Identity, analyzes contemporary Russian literature, cinema, and visual art in Israel. He is also currently working on an English-language anthology of contemporary Russian-Israeli poetry.

Zackary Sholem Berger is a poet and translator in Baltimore working in and among English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, with occasional forays into other languages. His latest book is All the Holes Line Up (2019); a volume of his translations of the Yiddish prose poetry of Avrom Sutzkever is due out soon.

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Photo Credit: Sivan Tzadok