Talk between Mati Shemoelof (writer and poet) and Esther Voet (Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad)
After the terrorist attack in the Halle synagogue, it is clearer more than ever that the fabric of Jewish-German relations has drastically changed. Jewish communities across Europe have increasingly taken precautions to safeguard themselves against violence after a sharp rise of antisemitism and antisemitic hate crimes. In Berlin however a new flourishing Hebrew literary scene came to life with the Israeli immigration in the recent years.
How do these two different processes go together? Does the Jewish creativity have an answer to the rise of antisemitism? How does it feel to be an Israeli Arab-Jew in Berlin?
We will talk the Jewish poet and writer
Mati Shemoelof who has been living now in Berlin for six years. The talk will also include the reading of poems and an open discussion with the audience.
Mati Shemoelof was born in 1972 in Haifa. He is a poet, editor and writer. He graduated with honors from the University of Haifa where he studied Film and History. Shemoelof has published seven poetry books so far. The last of these,
Baghdad | Haifa | Berlin, was published in Germany in 2019 in a bilingual edition. His first article book
An eruption from the east: Re-visiting the emergence of the Mizrahi artistic explosion and it's imprint on the Israeli cultural narrative 2006-2019 will be published on Iton 77 publishers in Israel (2020)
.
In Berlin he founded Poetic Hafla group that creates literary & performances events. Right now Shemoelof is working on the new literary project
Anu אנו نحن: Jews and Arabs writing in Berlin.
He wrote columns and reviews on
Israel Hayom from the day it was founded until Shemoelof's departure from Israel (2007-2014). Then he wrote an
Israeli in Berlin column in the
Haaretz newspaper (2015) and until today he writes an English column for
Plus 61J magazine.
Mati Shemoelof works in literary editing and communication.
Esther Hilah Voet (1963) is a Dutch journalist/commentator and the editor in chief of the
Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad. She is one of the leading Dutch-Jewish voices and was director of the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel, a watchdog on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias. She is an internationally acknowledged commentator on Israel and antisemitism in the Netherlands, and informed as such the Knesset, the American State Department and Georgetown University in Washington.
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