Yetzirah Pre-Recorded Workshop—“Learning to Say We” with Joy Ladin

Like many of us, I’m finding it harder and harder to say “We” these days. Memes, snark, propaganda, and social and political divisions are making it harder to say “We” as Jews, as Americans, as human beings in ways that affirm our connection to everyone else who shares these identities.

In this class, we will push back by exploring poetry’s ancient power to create new ways of embracing and expanding a collective identity By examining and comparing texts from within and outside Jewish tradition—such as Ki Anu Ameicha from the High Holiday liturgy, Adrienne Rich’s “In Those Years,” Jacob Glatstein’s “Dead Men Don’t Praise God,” Dan Pagis’s “Autobiography,” and Charles Simic’s “East European Cooking”—we will explore how complicated it can be to say “We”; how to critique and creatively engage with different approaches to the first-person plural; and how we can learn from others’ examples to say “We” in ways that inspire us, challenge us, and connect us to those outside our comfort zones and algorithmic bubbles.

Workshop Costs

Purchase the asynchronous workshop here to receive:

• One recorded class
• Link to poems discussed in class

$24—standard registration

$20—discounted registration for Yetzirah Members (you can become a member here)

*As we want our offerings to be accessible to all, there is a pay-what-you-can option if this pricing is a hardship. Please contact Kyra Lisse at klisse@yetzirahpoets.org for a sliding scale option.

About Joy

Joy Ladin has published ten books of poetry, most recently Shekhinah Speaks (Selva Oscura Press, 2022); National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; The Future is Trying to Tell Us; Something: New and Selected Poems; and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation. She is also the author of a memoir of gender transition, the National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life, and another work of creative nonfiction, the Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors. She has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including an On Being with Krista Tippett interview that has been rebroadcast several times.