A DIFFERENT KIND OF KOSHER

by Todd Friedman

Dirt under your fingernails, backbone straight,

you would be the New Jew.

 

Clearing the swamp, rifle ready,

no more lambs to the slaughter.

 

The world was with you, Israel,

Buchenwald’s emaciated ghosts still searing.

 

My grandmother shouted through tears for you

in a jam-packed Madison Square Garden.

 

You were our Samson fighting

the entire Philistine army.

 

When you captured Jerusalem, shofars blowing,

it was the Red Sea parting anew.

 

Who can forget that photo of your “crying paratroopers”

standing in front of the Wailing Wall?

 

But now every day your settlers descend the hills masked:

smashing cars, bashing heads, burning villages.

 

And like Joshua’s sun your army stands still—

or even aids in the slaughter.

 

This is what my grandfather fled from in Russia—

only there it was called a pogrom.

 

So here you are, the New Jew,

with ancient real estate “deed” and a different kind of kosher.

 

We now know that Samson

was blind to begin with—

 

and so were we.

 

 

 

Todd Friedman is a retired  NYC high school English teacher who now revels in having time to write.  His poems have been published in Tikkun, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blue Collar Review, and Vox Populi.

JERUSALEM EVEN NOW

by Esther Cohen

Two sirens before 8 AM woke Ibtisam, a Palestinian,

and her Jewish neighbor Melila. They’ve lived

in the same Jerusalem building for decades.

In their pajamas, sleepless after the loud attack

the night before, they decided they’d clean

the building together, as something positive they

could do. And when they finished

removing spider webs and dust, they celebrated

the new cleanliness with mint tea

and homemade butter cookies.

Esther Cohen’s new book is All of Us.

EMPERATORI PARS VE GHARB (THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST)

by J. P. Linstroth
 

To Our Armed Forces 

 

 

Combat between a Persian (left) and a Greek (right), depicted on a cup at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Credit: Wikipedia

 

I.

A vision of armies of men in thousands kicking up dust in white puffs in ordered unison files

                        Marching forward, beating rounded shields of Athenian owls and Spartan Lambda letters

            Their burnished Corinthian helmets, their fierce eyes peering through almond bronze slits

Aeneous and glinting bronze in the sun, horsehair plumes of varying colours, waving from zephyrs

                        Metallic and muscular cuirasses shining aurulent and golden in harsh sunlight

 

Emperatori Pars under Darius the Great and his son, Xerxes, the existential threat to Greek isles

Legends, the Athenian General Miltiades at Marathon, King Lionidas at Thermopylae Pass, with no betters

            In ancient times from the West, even with acrimony among Hellenes, and all their splits

Moving as one at the Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis, against Persian aggressors

With bronze swords drawn, a chiliad of pointing dorata, gleaming helmets behind shields tensed to fight

 

            Cleverness of the Greeks tricking Persians in battle even with their formations across many miles

Outnumbering the Hellenes in the thousands and the weightiness of death in all its bellicose fetters

            If it were not for these brave men, then what of Western civilization, and all its benefits

To win the day, again and again, and many times at great loss, the sacrifice of war, and all its tethers

            For empire, for glory, for homeland, even with Pars Bozorg (Persian Empire), the Greeks never bowed to their might

 

II.

            And more than two thousand and five hundred years forward a war against old Persia continues

Having become part of Islam and Shia from the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali and following the Imams

Reaching back to the death of Mohammed and at one time British and following the Shah

With all its oil riches and arcane monarchy and then the Iranian Revolution and American hostages in ’79

            And the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and advent of an oppressive Iranian theocracy

 

And so our past repeats, again and again, from ancient times til now regardless of disparate epochal venues

Every time and place, men in continual discord, even against the House of David, and revenge of Absalom

            How soon we forget after unity against Great Persia, Athenians and Spartans brawled in awe

Of brother against brother, Greek to Greek, the Peloponnesian War, how civil wars intertwine

            From Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, of voids to the destruction of Republics and Democracy

 

Can you not see we are the same brethren, those of the reds, whites, and blues

            The same from Washington, the same from Gettysburg, but now directives from Jerusalem

Across Zagros and Alborz ranges and deserts, against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their Allah

            To contend with ourselves, and not think Poland 1939, but reverse time, and save our demokratia

 

III.

            For all our technologies and our missiles and our Artificial Intelligence and aircraft carriers

War is no less terrible and spontaneous circumstances no less unforeseen and death death death

            Young men struggle for generals’ musings far removed and clash in arms on land, sea, and air

Often far from homelands, for fellow brothers, for fellow countrymen, for the flag under God

            And Persia once more erased, once more conquered by armies as powerful as Hellenic hordes

 

 

Lest we forget ourselves in conquest and lose our values and our Republic, lest we remove such barriers

            For ours a Constitutional Republic and much celebrated, lest we drink from the waters of Lethe

Lest we forget red poppy fields of the Somme, or white crosses of Normandy, and markers en plein air

            As our Arlington and Tomb of the Unknown, so many Medals of Honour, so many left abroad

Lest we forget how the Iranians ignored our pleas to avert a day of war by dismissing all our accords

 

But remember this one and all, we are Americans, our nation is still true, our jets as raptors and harriers

Ripping azure skies, missiles through azuline heavens, across Strait of Hormuz, against Iranian shibboleth

From Mullahs and their enforcement of Islamic law, at the expense of the Iranian populace and its despair

            May ours be a road to freedom, away from Shiite clerics, a regime heavily flawed

By waging war in the name of God, supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis, their demise by swords

 

IV.

            And while the thousands marched and thousands more gunned down for their freedom

Lest we forget ours in these uncertain times and living with mendacity and profiteering

            At the expense of our dignity of our community of our brotherhood of our common sense

Lest we forget our Independence from tyranny, lest we forget our lacking representation

            And we remember Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau and our Enlightenment

 

Now some two-hundred and fifty years, from independence to civil war, now extremam corruptiem

            Of our leaders to whom we entrust with our lives, but who seem immune from sneering

And directing us toward wars and away from personal investigations and forgetting our tariffed expense

May we uphold the pillars of our democratic oaths by not scapegoating the newest from migration

While understanding hyper-capitalism undermining our social welfare from Neo-Gilded Age Entitlement

 

To our brave soldiers, brave men and women, who fight for our Republic, not as vassals for a fiefdom

Lest forgetting Spartan might won over Athenian intellect, and protect ourselves with judicial hearings

            If necessary and to use our laws and our cameras and checking imbalances in our defence

So, to the breach against armies and foes, now the Iranians, we ask to pray for victims in supplication

            Likewise remembering who we are and our history, and not the spoiled life of a political miscreant

 

To America, to America, forever the brave and the bold

            Across the seas from now and remembering times of old

                        May we remember our fallen heroes always, their fearlessness not to be cajoled

 

To America, to America, the beautiful and the bold

            May we always protect our sea shining shores, may your glories always be extolled

 

                        To America, to America

                                    Now and forever as many have before foretold

                                                About the land of our brave and our bold

 

 

J. P. Linstroth has a PhD (D.Phil.) in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK with several awards for his research concentrating on the Spanish-Basques, Brazilian urban Amerindians, and Cuban, Haitian, and Guatemalan-Mayan immigrants in South Florida. He is an Adjunct Professor at Palm Beach State College (PBSC) and the author of several books: Marching Against Gender Practice: Political Imaginings in the Basqueland (2015, Bloomsbury Books); The Forgotten Shore (Poetic Matrix Press, 2017); Epochal Reckonings (Proverse Publishers HK, 2020, Winner of Proverse Prize 2019); Politics and Racism Beyond Nations: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Crises (2022, Palgrave Macmillan); and Swimming in Blue Shadows: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems (2022, Proverse Publishing, Proverse Supplemental Prize). He was awarded a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholar Grant (2008-2009) to study urban Amerindians in Manaus, Brazil and he received a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for his accomplishments toward peace, conflict resolution, and social justice. 

IT’S NOT (YET) TOO LATE (MAYBE)

by Katy Z. Allen

Gazans Are Dying of Starvation. —The New York Times, July 24, 2025

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

A monarch butterfly flutters among the bushes and flowers beside the pond.

Memories rise up: 

a transformational summer in Jerusalem studying Hebrew;

the power of my first experience of the Kotel;

a summer rabbinic seminar at the Shalom Hartman Institute;

visits with my future mother-in-law in Tel Aviv, and later, in Kfar Saba; 

bicycling the shaded byways of the Hula Valley and quiet desert roads of the Negev in support of “nature knows no borders.”

A pond blanketed with giant American Lotus leaves and blossoms spreads out before the eye.

Netanyahu, State of Israel,

it’s not yet too late. (Maybe.)

You still have time to change course,

to save your souls, 

and the souls of all Israelis,

and the souls all the Jews spread out 

around the planet;

you still have time to remember that G?d created every single human being on this planet

and that they are all sacred 

in the eyes of the Holy One of Blessing;

you still have time.

Tall spikes of purple and white showy tick-trefoil mingle with abundant Queen Anne’s lace.

You have the power, the knowledge, and the ability 

to send massive amounts of medical supplies and food to Gaza,

to guard them from Hamas with your troops,

and to feed and treat 

and save the lives of thousands of ordinary starving Gazans,

who are trapped by your inhumanity.

You still have time.

A great blue heron stands silently, gazing into the water, listening, waiting.

It’s not too late. Yet.

But before long it will be.

And then you will have not only 

the blood of many, many more children, women, and men on your hands and your hearts,

but you will have desecrated all that is sacred and holy of Eretz Yisrael;

you will have violated every one of the 613 mitzvot in the Torah,

if not by the letter of the law,

then most certainly by its spirit;

you will have lost and abandoned your humanity,

as individuals and as a country;

you will be deserving, 

(painful as it will be to watch), 

of every single bit of retribution that will come your way;

you will have destroyed the Jewish people and state more completely 

than Hamas could ever have dreamed of doing by itself;

you will have deserted your people,

your country,

and your G!d.

A pair of black and yellow swallowtail butterflies spiral upward in a dance of unity.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, co-founder of a Jewish climate organization, eco-chaplain, and writer since the age of eight. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and The Jewish Poets Collective Journal. Her poetic book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing.

THE INNER LIFE OF A HENCHMAN

by Michael Brockley

Photo by Amy Volovski at Birds&Blooms.

The cardinals nesting in the barberry bush beneath my bedroom window work together as if they have fledged many chicks during their brief lives. The mother, dusty brown and patient, approaches her chicks through aerial feints. And by hopping from lower branches to the upper fork where the hatchlings await the spiders and crickets she delivers. The scarlet male darts and barrel rolls toward its forage with what I pretend is pride. 

Soldiers were once children in such a hurry to fly. I was such a boy aiming toy bazookas and sniper rifles at Lincoln Log forts under siege. Now I celebrate the appetites of five hungry gullets, hoping the chicks survive the neighbor cat’s overnight prowls. If I can’t protect the spring’s latest brood, how can I save the children of Jerusalem and Rafah.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Parliament Literary Journal, Stormwash: Environmental Poems, and Barstow and Grand. Poems are forthcoming in Of Rust and Glass, Ryder Magazine, Otherwise Elsewhere Literature and Arts Journal, and The Prose Poem. 

THE EARRING

by Heather H. Thomas

Hamas fighters stormed the Nova festival on 7 October and killed hundreds.

The evening river is gray jade, 

the tree line charred pink. 

 

Rose quartz earring

rescued from the roadside, 

shelters in my palm.

 

I remember Jerusalem—the golden

Dome of the Rock hazed out

in dust storms, random stabbings 

 

canceling my trip 

to the Temple Mount

also called Al-Aqsa Mosque. 

 

Different people worship the same places, 

sometimes under different names.

 

Red alert on D’s phone—incoming 

missile—D says she leapt

from her car into a ditch. 

 

My birthday, I sit alone in a Tel Aviv café, 

alarm shrieking—yet none move

to shelter, everyone chatting, trusting 

 

the Iron Dome to intercept.

 

Few can speak of it now: 

trance music, dawn cocktails, 

missile light mistaken for fireworks, 

 

then sudden noises of death—

 

After, women’s bodies mutilated, 

some missing the bottom half—

 

Survivors almost not 

here—eyes hollow, 

speechless they shake                         

                                                

with the silence of living.

 

The darkness you saw, we’re going to bring back 

the light, therapists tell them. 

 

Sometimes only a small body 

part remains, a finger, a foot, a hand, 

                                                                  

trace of mascara on eyelashes, 

an earring she put on that morning.

Author’s Note: The poem blends details, which were reported in The New York Times and BBC, of the violence at the Nova festival with memories of my 2015 visit to Israel. The detail of the earring was reported by the BBC as an example of tiny objects, along with actual body parts, which were all that remained of some victims.  

Heather H. Thomas is a poet from Reading, Pennsylvania, the author of Vortex Street(FutureCycle Press) and five other poetry collections. Recent work has been published in Barrow Street, Cutthroat, New Verse News, Pedestal Magazine, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Her work is translated into six languages, including Arabic.