About 

 

         

Reading

​

This site is maintained by Janice Weziman. For ten years Janice served as Fiction editor at the Ilanot Review, an online literary journal. She has reviewed books for The Jerusalem Report, The New York Journal of Books and World Literature Today, and other venues. Read more about Janice here.

​

​

Jewish

​

The Jewish perspective views the world through a unique lens. It brings to creative work a standpoint that traverses three millennia of human history, as well as conversations with numerous other cultures, many of which no longer exist. As a mode of thinking that bases itself on the written word, the Jewish perspective carries access to a wealth of texts, both interpretive and creative, a multi-faceted library of voices, languages, and genres that invites interaction. From its inception, Judaism has been a defining force in Western civilization, not only in its varied styles of thought, but in the very questions it poses. Writing Jewish fiction is an exercise in re-envisioning the individual in the framework of a long historical perspective. The imagined characters of Jewish fiction carry in their bones the experience and memory of Jewish history, but ultimately, it is never only about them. As Bernard Malamed once said "All men are Jews, except they don't know it."  

​

Fiction

​

Writing fiction is a way of thinking about what it means to exist in a particular time and place. It is alive to the presence of imminent ideas, the delicate interplay of will and fate, the unsayable. If our time is can be characterized by a ceaseless  expression of the self, Fiction subtly addresses that which we cannot easily express, and what we are often too preoccupied to notice. Its sole substance is language, but it cannot function without insight and imagination. Through the attentive, skilled deployment of voice, tone, image, setting, character, and subtext, writers of fiction enable us to transcend the here and now, and open new vistas from which to consider our realities.

​