Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

What this episode covers

In this lecture, writers Adina Hoffamn and Peter Cole discuss the recovery of a cache of Hebrew manuscripts from a Cairo geniza (repository for sacred text), whose discovery and analysis have shed light on 900 years of Jewish life. NEA, NEH, Guggenheim and McArthur award-winning poet and translator, Peter Cole was the Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center in 2006. Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, a biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, from Yale University Press. Her essays and literary criticism have appeared in the Nation, the TLS, the Raritan, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, New York Newsday, World Literature Today, and on the World Service of the BBC. Ms. Hoffman was the Franke Visiting Fellow in 2008. Together Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Cole are the founders and editors of Ibis Editions—a small press that publishes the literature of the Levant.

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