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Cleveland writer guides English writers in Israel
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BY: LILA HANFT Staff Reporter
In 1969, 23-year-old Judy Labensohn published her first article, an eyewitness account of the arson at the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, here in the pages of the Cleveland Jewish News.
A Cleveland native who had moved to Israel two years earlier, Labensohn was on her way to work as a translator for the mayor of Jerusalem’s office when she saw smoke coming from Al-Aksa Mosque and went to investigate.
It was the style at the time to refer to young, unmarried women as “girls,” and above Labensohn’s article, the CJN ran a banner identifying the author as a “Cleveland girl” and the “daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Neal Stonehill.” The accompanying photo shows a fresh-faced, winsome girl, a gamine with cropped hair and a lace collar.
From the first sentence, however, it’s clear that Labensohn is no dilettante. “Because I had not listened to the eight o’clock news the morning of Thursday, Aug. 21, I had no idea another ‘incident’ had occurred as I drove to work,” she begins.
Labensohn has a good eye for telling details as well as the political savvy to understand the implications of the parts of the “incident” she does witness. Noting the absence of onlookers, Labensohn wonders if Israelis “had become so used to incidents that they could hardly break their daily routine to watch reality in the making.” As she watches, a mob of young Muslim men emerge from the burning mosque, voices raised in protest. She sees on their faces “fierce emotions (of) confusion, distrust and hatred” and predicts that “the repercussions of the event will remain with us a long while.”
Israel as living history
Fully alert to the historical potential of the moment, Labensohn imagines that the fire rages “just as it might have raged in the year 70, destroying (the) Temple on the same holy site.” Such moments are the reason Labensohn moved to Israel after she “fell in love with Israel” during a five-week visit in 1966.
When she arrived for a what was intended to be a one-year stay in 1967, “everything was different,” thanks to the optimism following the Six Day War. “Jerusalem was the city of gold, of hope and imagination,” she recalls. The zeitgeist was “pure victory” as she walked to the Western Wall in a crowd of 250,000 people on Tisha B’av, 1967. “I was thinking, ‘Why aren’t Americans rushing over to be part of this?’”
“One year turned into 40 years, and I never came back” to the U.S., she adds. Although much has changed in four decades, Labensohn “still loves Israel. I feel privileged and lucky to live there, despite all the horrible things,” she told the CJN during a recent visit to Cleveland. “American Jews who don’t have some emotional investment in Israel are missing a huge part of their heritage.”
Writing about Israel for English-speakers became an avocation and then a vocation for Labensohn. She continued writing “about things going on around me” in Israel for the Cleveland Jewish News and also published feature stories in Hadassah magazine, personal essays in Lilith magazine, and had a regular column in The Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, she became a psychiatric social worker, married, had three children, and later divorced. Tired of social work, Labensohn worked at Neot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel. As a tour guide, she made the biblical landscape “come alive” for visitors and later incorporated writing and contemplation into the experience with “Hike ’n’ Write” workshops.
Writing from the margins
Labensohn thinks of her writing as “my way of coping with life, trying to make sense of being an immigrant in Israel.” She had always been drawn to nonfiction and “loved reading essays,” particularly those of Joan Didion and E.B. White. Labensohn formalized her study of the writing with an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2001, a scriptwriting course at The Jerusalem Cinemateque in 2003, and a master’s in English (fiction) from Bar Ilan University in 2006.
Along the way, Labensohn embraced her identity as someone who “writes from the margins,” particularly after she wrote an aricle for Hadassah magazine about Russian writers living in Israel and writing in Russian.
“It was never my goal to master the language enough to be a Hebrew writer,” Labensohn explains. “Israel is my home, but clean English sentences are the landscapes in which I feel most comfortable.”
Writers, she asserts, are already living in the margins of their society. “As a writer in a foreign language n even a country of marginalized people like Israel n you’re even more (marginalized). As an immigrant writer, I teeter over the rift between the state of Israel and my native tongue.”
Teacher, mentor
Labensohn’s success as an English writer in Israel has given her the opportunity to mentor others in her position. She regularly teaches workshops for beginning writers and mentors experienced writers from her home in Moshav Beit Zayit (see Write in Israel with Judy Labensohn at www.writeinisrael.com/index.php). She boasts of several “success stories” among her students, including Reva Mann, author of the well-received autobiography The Rabbi’s Daughter: Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy (Random House).
“I brought her a meager twenty pages and asked her to teach me how to write,” Mann recalls. “Judy was a guiding light, a careful reader, an insightful editor, and an inspiring and encouraging teacher. I owe so much of my success to her.”
Labensohn also leads popular weekend writing retreats with translator and fiction writer Evan Fallenberg, a native Clevelander living in Israel. Their upcoming workshop is titled “Talk to Me: A Writing Retreat on Dialogue.”
She’s proudest of her contributions as coordinator of the Shandy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, which offers “a home for Jewish writers from all over the world.”
The program “expresses my belief that Israel is a wonderful place to nurture Jewish writers,” she explains. “Americans can come and spend a year at Bar-Ilan taking courses. Then they can spend their second year writing their theses in Israel or back in the States.
“This job is the pinnacle of my desire to legitimize writing in English in Israel,” she believes. Still she admits that since starting the job, she hasn’t written much herself. “My imagination is preoccupied with the Chelm-like procedures of the university bureaucracy.”
lhanft@cjn.org
A Cleveland native who had moved to Israel two years earlier, Labensohn was on her way to work as a translator for the mayor of Jerusalem’s office when she saw smoke coming from Al-Aksa Mosque and went to investigate.
It was the style at the time to refer to young, unmarried women as “girls,” and above Labensohn’s article, the CJN ran a banner identifying the author as a “Cleveland girl” and the “daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Neal Stonehill.” The accompanying photo shows a fresh-faced, winsome girl, a gamine with cropped hair and a lace collar.
From the first sentence, however, it’s clear that Labensohn is no dilettante. “Because I had not listened to the eight o’clock news the morning of Thursday, Aug. 21, I had no idea another ‘incident’ had occurred as I drove to work,” she begins.
Labensohn has a good eye for telling details as well as the political savvy to understand the implications of the parts of the “incident” she does witness. Noting the absence of onlookers, Labensohn wonders if Israelis “had become so used to incidents that they could hardly break their daily routine to watch reality in the making.” As she watches, a mob of young Muslim men emerge from the burning mosque, voices raised in protest. She sees on their faces “fierce emotions (of) confusion, distrust and hatred” and predicts that “the repercussions of the event will remain with us a long while.”
Israel as living history
Fully alert to the historical potential of the moment, Labensohn imagines that the fire rages “just as it might have raged in the year 70, destroying (the) Temple on the same holy site.” Such moments are the reason Labensohn moved to Israel after she “fell in love with Israel” during a five-week visit in 1966.
When she arrived for a what was intended to be a one-year stay in 1967, “everything was different,” thanks to the optimism following the Six Day War. “Jerusalem was the city of gold, of hope and imagination,” she recalls. The zeitgeist was “pure victory” as she walked to the Western Wall in a crowd of 250,000 people on Tisha B’av, 1967. “I was thinking, ‘Why aren’t Americans rushing over to be part of this?’”
“One year turned into 40 years, and I never came back” to the U.S., she adds. Although much has changed in four decades, Labensohn “still loves Israel. I feel privileged and lucky to live there, despite all the horrible things,” she told the CJN during a recent visit to Cleveland. “American Jews who don’t have some emotional investment in Israel are missing a huge part of their heritage.”
Writing about Israel for English-speakers became an avocation and then a vocation for Labensohn. She continued writing “about things going on around me” in Israel for the Cleveland Jewish News and also published feature stories in Hadassah magazine, personal essays in Lilith magazine, and had a regular column in The Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, she became a psychiatric social worker, married, had three children, and later divorced. Tired of social work, Labensohn worked at Neot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel. As a tour guide, she made the biblical landscape “come alive” for visitors and later incorporated writing and contemplation into the experience with “Hike ’n’ Write” workshops.
Writing from the margins
Labensohn thinks of her writing as “my way of coping with life, trying to make sense of being an immigrant in Israel.” She had always been drawn to nonfiction and “loved reading essays,” particularly those of Joan Didion and E.B. White. Labensohn formalized her study of the writing with an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2001, a scriptwriting course at The Jerusalem Cinemateque in 2003, and a master’s in English (fiction) from Bar Ilan University in 2006.
Along the way, Labensohn embraced her identity as someone who “writes from the margins,” particularly after she wrote an aricle for Hadassah magazine about Russian writers living in Israel and writing in Russian.
“It was never my goal to master the language enough to be a Hebrew writer,” Labensohn explains. “Israel is my home, but clean English sentences are the landscapes in which I feel most comfortable.”
Writers, she asserts, are already living in the margins of their society. “As a writer in a foreign language n even a country of marginalized people like Israel n you’re even more (marginalized). As an immigrant writer, I teeter over the rift between the state of Israel and my native tongue.”
Teacher, mentor
Labensohn’s success as an English writer in Israel has given her the opportunity to mentor others in her position. She regularly teaches workshops for beginning writers and mentors experienced writers from her home in Moshav Beit Zayit (see Write in Israel with Judy Labensohn at www.writeinisrael.com/index.php). She boasts of several “success stories” among her students, including Reva Mann, author of the well-received autobiography The Rabbi’s Daughter: Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy (Random House).
“I brought her a meager twenty pages and asked her to teach me how to write,” Mann recalls. “Judy was a guiding light, a careful reader, an insightful editor, and an inspiring and encouraging teacher. I owe so much of my success to her.”
Labensohn also leads popular weekend writing retreats with translator and fiction writer Evan Fallenberg, a native Clevelander living in Israel. Their upcoming workshop is titled “Talk to Me: A Writing Retreat on Dialogue.”
She’s proudest of her contributions as coordinator of the Shandy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, which offers “a home for Jewish writers from all over the world.”
The program “expresses my belief that Israel is a wonderful place to nurture Jewish writers,” she explains. “Americans can come and spend a year at Bar-Ilan taking courses. Then they can spend their second year writing their theses in Israel or back in the States.
“This job is the pinnacle of my desire to legitimize writing in English in Israel,” she believes. Still she admits that since starting the job, she hasn’t written much herself. “My imagination is preoccupied with the Chelm-like procedures of the university bureaucracy.”
lhanft@cjn.org
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