Author’s Note: Growing up as a conservative Jew and attending an Orthodox day school in New York, I was taught from an early age to love Jerusalem, the city that means “holy” to three major religions. I went there twice as a teenager. Every year at Passover we sang, “l’shana ha’bah, b’Yirushalayim”—“next year in Jerusalem.” Elders explained, “of course, we don’t mean that literally.”

These poems are about more than the city of Jerusalem and my (and my family’s) experiences there; they examine the idea of Jerusalem, and the way we all can’t let go of it. In 1995, when Arafat and Rabin came the closest to signing a peace agreement, they each referenced Jerusalem in their public speeches, hinting that a shared city of gold might be only a dream.

Jump to the spring of 2018. I watched in horror as Trump and Netanyahu colluded to do the unthinkable—moving the Israeli capital to Jerusalem, and sparking a series of Palestinian protests and disproportional Israeli violence. Though the thought and feeling in these poems are drawn from decades of live experience, it is this lattermost crisis that prompted the actual writing of these poems.

Many thanks to Zachary Bos of the Boston Poetry Union for hosting a workshop where folks gathered to read and respond to early drafts. I am grateful to Matthew Lippman for his feedback on later versions and for helping me narrow down my many found poems to the two best ones. Thank you to Rabbi Toba Spitzer for teaching me about God as metaphor and for her many thoughtful dvars and midrashim. And of course, love and thanks to my parents for engendering my Jewish identity, for their support of my writing poems, and for double-checking all the dates and family details in this collection. – JAG

The poem “Mandatory Palestine” was first published in Love’s Executive Order; “In Europe, Mothers Enjoy Two Years of Maternity Leave” and “I Buried the Workweek” appeared in The Good Men Project, whose editors nominated the latter for the Pushcart Prize; “There Was a Man Named Job” was published in Juxtaprose; and “The Front Gates of the Jewish Graveyard in Cairo” is forthcoming in Clarion. All five poems in this set appear, along with the other ten poems in the Jerusalem series, in printed broadsheet format, as a gallery exhibition running from September to December 2019 in the sanctuary of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in West Newton, Massachusetts.

The art on the title print is modified from a scan of a 1634 map of Jerusalem produced in Jerusalem and Mar Saba, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.