Zackary Sholem Berger's Blog, page 11
February 18, 2016
Partnering with Patients in Decision-Making: Continuing the Conversation at Johns Hopkins
Partnering with Patients in Decision-Making: Continuing the Conversation at Johns Hopkins will take place on June 1st, 2016, from 8am to 5pm, in the Owens Auditorium in the Cancer Research Building. Open to all, this meeting will feature discussions of clinical, educational, and research approaches to decision making in the Johns Hopkins Medicine context, emphasizing diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the particular needs of Baltimore. Two keynote speakers with national reputations, as well as a poster session, will help make this a day to assess where we stand and move forward to enable change. The meeting is free of charge.
Our generous sponsors are the School of Nursing, the Patient Experience Office at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the journal The Patient — Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, as well as the Primary Care Consortium. Institutional sponsors include the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, and the Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Please respond to this poll to let us know whether you might attend and how you might like to be involved further.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VV25NMS
Best wishes,
Zackary Berger, MD, PhD
For the organizing committee
January 11, 2016
December 26, 2015
A piano master’s love for Yiddish, and the poems he read recently at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times recently covered the Yiddishophilia — in recitation and in his own poetic creations — of the contemporary master pianist Evgeny Kissin. The poems he recited, and their translations (by me, among others), are available here. Here is one of them.
A teatr iz di velt (The World’s a Theater)
Translated by Zackary Sholem Berger
The world’s a theater.
God’s director.
A fine play. A pity, though:
The prompter is the Devil.
The booth is the black heart.
The Devil forges the play!
And if you recite the wrong thing
You can’t take it back!
Of course, you can’t be careful enough.
And can’t make a fuss.
The play is fantastic.
The mistakes – genius!
The actor stumbles too.
When he’s supposed
to hurl the cup away,
he brings it to his mouth!
The wine drops glow like flames.
He empties the glass.
There’s no hurrying the thunder.
God’s patience is great.
November 24, 2015
October 28, 2015
Ethics of Healthcare Decision Making: great first class!
Great first class yesterday at the Berman Institute in my new course, Ethics of Healthcare Decision Making. What is needed for a decision? What are the goals? More to come on these topics, and our fascinating discussions.
October 26, 2015
Tradittore, traductora: me, translated, on Spanish radio
Here is a presentation about me and my poetry on Radio Sefarad, with a reading of one of my Yiddish poems paired with a Spanish translation. A pleasure to corr
espond with Varda Fiszbein about Yiddish poetry.
October 15, 2015
Lonely in New York: A brief introduction to a lugubrious American genius
Aron Glantz-Leyeles does not make things easy for the translator or critic. A formalist, he was of a philosophical, lugubrious bent; spending most of his life in America, he was no troubadour, guerilla fighter, or escaped refusenik. Neither did he become the harrowing, post-war poet of Holocaust remembrance (like Jacob Glatstein), triangulating God’s absence with the calipers of Jewish history and the “goyim’s” nonchalance. His lyric conclusions are different, and more deliberate.
More on the virtuoso of loneliness in a blogpost of mine (including some new translations of Leyeles’ verse) posted recently at In Geveb.
A Smile at the End of the World
Maybe a law of gravitation was in force here too:
Suddenly I found myself attracted to a strange unknown city. This city wasn’t included in the itinerary of my voyage round the world by air. I didn’t even know its name, or whether such a clime was to be found on Earth at all.
It happened this way:
When the airplane slid out of the slanted air onto the silky smooth runway, on its way to kick out some passengers to their connecting flight, glugging itself full of gas, or some other drinkable, en route to another nonstop across the sea — I nonchalantly grabbed my bag and in a daze followed the few passengers off the plane.
Read “A Smile at the End of the World,” this story by Avrom Sutzkever in my translation, thanks to the editors at B O D Y. The original is from his volume Green Aquarium. If you are a publisher who is interested in a fantastic volume of prose poems like this one, be in touch!
Poetry with music, November 8th in DC
F
or a polyglot midrashic poetic joyride on a Yiddish-English-Baltimore-American bassackward hybrid – with musical 
stylings too – come see me and Cantor Ariane Brown at Adas Israel Congregation, Washington, DC, on Sunday, November 8th. I’ll read from my book of poetry One Nation Taken Out of Another, which features the following main characters:
Avra(ha)m of Ur
Avrom Sutzkever
God
Me
Matriarchs aplenty
Amy Weinhouse
Nadav
Avihu
et al.
Sent to the editor:
Sent to the editor: manuscript for MAKING SENSE OF MEDICINE: Bridging Patient Preferences and Physician Guidelines
