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Encountering Edward Said on Yom Kippur: Reflections on the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is a fascinating and controversial collection of journals and meditations on the plight and possibility of the prophetic witness in the modern world.  In these pages, the Jewish theologian, Marc H. Ellis, explores the prophetic through his encounters with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, as a way of thinking through the stakes of contemporary Jewish history. His unexpected encounter with Said on Yom Kippur provides a fascinating window to explore the dangers and possibilities of present-day Jewish life and its future. Ellis applies Said’s idea of late-style to the Jewish prophetic – what Ellis names the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic – to mean the reappearance and coming home of the Jewish prophetic as it undergoes its own deconstruction and re-emergence. At turns deeply personal and creatively theoretical, Ellis doesn’t shy away from the forbidden terrains of self questioning and progressive posturing, even with people and movements he identifies with. The result is a sensitive and provocative exploration filled with questions and responses rather than definitive answers.

I’ve been a professional journalist for over 50 years now, a prose writer whose favorite form is the essay. But there are emotions that poetry seems to capture better than prose. Not unique emotions because there are no such things as unique emotions, only the emotions shared by all of us, shared by the whole world. For me, prose seems much more observational, more a reflection of what our senses present and whatever meaning we attach to that reflection. Poetry is more an attempt to understand our feelings by digging down into ourselves like a spelunker explores a cave. The cave is ourselves, and we try to discover—or more probably uncover—what's down there that makes us human. In these few poems I've tried to throw a small flashlight beam on a few of those places down there.