Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

Posted on May 5, 2025 by jillbpearlman

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an … Continue reading →

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To Be Immersed in Color

Posted on April 28, 2025 by jillbpearlman

To be immersed.  To be immersed in color, through the body medium.  Matisse wrote, “I must be so penetrated, so impregnated by my subject, that I can draw it with my eyes closed.”  Color emanates as a primal force in the Azure of … Continue reading →

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Festive Earworm

Posted on April 21, 2025 by jillbpearlman

O holidays of promised liberation:One towards an earthly land,One to a place promised posthumously.In our hands, Questions: Which way now, How to mind the gap, Is home home? Exile exile?  Do the two meet as two seas thatclash and shamble towards each other?

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Salt Water & Suffering

Posted on April 13, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Saying shema in the oldest synagoguein Fès part of a run-on sentence said before and after me,  as the long-gone rabbi still brays among lanterns and blue walls and sheep graze on the hillsides belowamong soul-white stones of the Jewish dead. As … Continue reading →

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Strait Up

Posted on April 6, 2025 by jillbpearlman

How narrow the narrow straits.  That divide us.  The width of a new moon.  The crescent of a fingernail clipping.  The narrows of sea washing between land fringed and scalloped – one side Africa, one side Europe.  A shudder of civilizations in that two-lidded eye … Continue reading →

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Lunching in Morocco during Ramadan

Posted on April 2, 2025 by jillbpearlman

To peer through the window, being Jewish, while the dominant culture celebrates its religious holiday; Christmas is the familiar scenario, but Ramadan a whole different thing. Three Ramadan weeks in Morocco, lunching in front of people who had woken at … Continue reading →

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The Shared Overlap of Skullcaps

Posted on March 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Naivëte, like a broken clock, gets it right twice daily. Jews and Muslims are cousins, are family, I hear in Morocco, from the taxi driver, the be-scarved woman  guarding a blue synagogue. Even though they should be cranky, be-swearing food and drink; even … Continue reading →

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Towards a New Form

Posted on March 3, 2025 by jillbpearlman

How to dreamwhen the egg is already brokenwhiskuntil softand silkyin what colorstowards what peace

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Bag of Grief

Posted on February 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

The human is a bag of grief; a bag pierced with holes, a multi-headed bag, split and splitagain.  It still asks questions: Who put the countryin the blender and pressed whirr; who remembers when “decent” was what we called citizens?Who let homo sapiens … Continue reading →

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It Poured Without Mercy

Posted on February 17, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Friends came for dinner, but nothing made her change her tone.  A steady strained B minor.   The dogs laid their drooling maws on her thigh.  First placid snow, then rain, like silent glistening stringsOf a harp. When did rain become opaque? Gentle no … Continue reading →

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