War and Poetry: Owen Lewis on Being a Jewish Poet in a Time of Crisis

“The Jewish voice must be heard, not because it's more right or less right, but it's there. The suffering is there, the grief is there, and human grief is human grief.”

As Jews around the world mark Tisha B’Av, we’re joined by Columbia University professor and award-winning poet Owen Lewis, whose new collection, “A Prayer of Six Wings,” offers a powerful reflection on grief in the aftermath of October 7th.

In this conversation, Lewis explores the healing power of poetry in the face of trauma, what it means to be a Jewish professor in today’s campus climate, and how poetry can foster empathy, encourage dialogue, and resist the pull of division.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

 

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Transcript of the Interview:

 

Owen Lewis:  

Overheard in a New York Restaurant.

 

I can't talk about Israel tonight. 

 

I know. 

 

I can't not talk about Israel tonight. 

 

I know. 

 

Can we talk about . . .

 

Here? Sure. Let's try to talk about here.

 

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

On Saturday night, Jews around the world will commemorate Tisha B'av. Known as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, the culmination of a three week period of mourning to commemorate several tragedies throughout early Jewish history. 

As a list of tragedies throughout modern Jewish history has continued to grow, many people spend this day fasting, listening to the book of Lamentations in synagogue, or visiting the graves of loved ones. Some might spend the day reading poetry. 

Owen Lewis is a Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. But he's also the award-winning author of four poetry collections which have won accolades, including the EE Cummings Prize and the Rumi Prize for Poetry. 

His most recent collection, A Prayer of Six Wings documents in verse his grief since the October 7 terror attacks. Owen is with us now to talk about the role of poetry in times of violence and war, what it's been like to be a Jewish professor on the Columbia campus, and a Jewish father with children and grandchildren in Israel. And also, how to keep writing amid a climate of rising antisemitism. Owen, welcome to People of the Pod.

Owen Lewis:  

Thank you so much, Manya.

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

So you opened with that short poem titled overheard in a New York restaurant. I asked you to read that because I wanted to ask whether it reflected how you felt about poetry after October 7. 

Did you find yourself in a place where you couldn't write about Israel, but yet you couldn't not write about Israel?

Owen Lewis:  

Among the many difficult things of that First Year, not only the war, not only the flagrant attacks on the posters of the hostages one block from where I live, 79th and Broadway, every day, taken down every day, put back up again, defaced. It was as if the war were being fought right here on 79th and Broadway. 

Another aspect that made this all so painful was watching the artistic and literary world turn against Israel. This past spring, 2000 writers and artists signed a petition, it was published, there was an oped about it in The Times, boycotting Israeli cultural institutions. 

And I thought: artists don't have a right to shut their ears. We all need to listen to each other's grief, and if we poets and artists can't listen to one another, what do we expect of statesmen? Statesmen, yeah, they can create a ceasefire. That's not the same as creating peace. And peace can only come when we really listen to each other.

To feel ostracized by the poetry community and the intellectual community was very painful. Fortunately, last summer, as well as this past summer, I was a fellow at the Yetzirah conference. Yetzirah is an organization of Jewish American poets, although we're starting to branch out. And this kind of in-gathering of like-minded people gave me so much strength. 

So this dilemma, I can't talk about it, because we just can't take the trauma. We can't take hearing one more thing about it, but not talk about it…it's a compulsion to talk about it, and that's a way to process trauma. And that was the same with this poetry, this particular book. 

I feel in many ways, it just kind of blew through me, and it was at the same time it blew through me, created this container in which I could express myself, and it actually held me together for that year. I mean, still, in many ways, the writing does that, but not as immediately and acutely as I felt that year. 

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

This book has been praised as not being for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged. So it's not it's not something that ideologically minded readers will necessarily be able to connect to, or is it actually quite the opposite? 

Owen Lewis: 

Well, it's very much written from the gut, from the experience, from in a sense, being on the ground, both in Israel and here in New York and on campus, and trying to keep a presence in the world of poetry and writers. So what comes from emotion should speak to emotion. There are a few wisps of political statements, but it's not essentially a politically motivated piece of writing. 

I feel that I have no problem keeping my sympathies with Israel and with Jews. I can still be critical of aspects of the government, and my sympathies can also be with the thousands of Palestinians, killed, hurt, displaced. I don't see a contradiction. I don't have to take sides. 

But the first poem is called My Partisan Grief, and it begins on October 7. I was originally going to call the bookMy Partisan Grief, because I felt that American, Jewish, and Israeli grief was being silenced, was being marginalized. And I wanted to say, this is our grief. Listen to it. You must listen to this. It doesn't privilege this grief over another grief. Grief is grief. But I wanted ultimately to move past that title into something broader, more encompassing, more humanitarian.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

And did that decision come as the death toll in Gaza rose and this war kept going and going and the hostages remained in captivity, did that kind of sway your thinking in terms of how to approach the book and frame it? 

Owen Lewis: 

Yes, but even more than those kind of headlines, which can be impersonal, the poetry of some remarkable Palestinian poets move me into a broader look. Abu Toha was first one who comes to mind Fady Joudah, who's also a physician, by the way. I mean his poetry, I mean many others, but it's gorgeous, moving poetry. 

Some of it is a diatribe, and you know, some of it is ideological, and people can do that with poetry, but when poetry really drills down into human experience, that's what I find so compelling and moving. And that's what I think can move the peace process. I know it sounds quite idealistic, but I really think poetry has a role in the peace process here.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

I want to I want to unpack that a little bit later. But first, I want to go back to the protests that were roiling Columbia's campus over the past year and a half, two years. What was it like to be, one, writing this book, but also, teaching on campus as a Jewish professor? 

Owen Lewis: 

Most of my teaching takes place up at the Medical Center at 168th Street. And there I have to say, I didn't feel battered in any way by what was happening. I had a very shocking experience. I had a meeting that I needed to attend on, or that had been scheduled, I hadn't been quite paying attention. I mean, I knew about the encampments, but I hadn't seen them, and I come face to face with a blocked campus. I couldn't get on the campus.

And what I'm staring at are signs to the effect, send the Jews back to Poland. I'm thinking, Where am I? What is this? I mean, protest, sure. I mean we expect undergraduates, we expect humans, to protest when things really aren't fair. But what did this have to do…why invoke the Holocaust and re-invoke it, as if to imply the Jews should be punished? All Jews. 

And what it fails to account for are the diversity of Jewish opinion. And you know, for some Jews, it's a black or white matter, but for most thinking Jews that I know, we all struggle very much with a loyalty to Israel, to the Jewish people, to the homeland and larger humanitarian values. So that was quite a shock.

And I wrote a piece called “The Scars of Encampment,” in which I say, I can't unsee that. " And I go to campus, and, okay, it's a little bit more security to get onto campus. It's a beautiful campus. It's like an oasis there, but at the same time, I'm seeing what was as if it still is. And in a way, that's the nature of trauma that things from the past just roil and are present with almost as much emotion as when first encountered.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

So did you need to tune out those voices, or did that fuel your work?

Owen Lewis: 

No, that fueled my work. I mean, if anything, it made me feel much more, a sense of mission with this book. And a commitment, despite criticism that I may receive, and no position I take is that outlandish, except to sympathize with the murdered on October 7th, to sympathize with their families, to resonate with what it must be like to have family members as hostages in brutal, brutal conditions. Not knowing whether they're dead or alive. So I really felt that the Jewish voice must be heard, not because it's more right or less right, but it's there. The suffering is there, the grief is there, and human grief is human grief.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

Owen, if you wouldn't mind reading another poem from the collection. Of course, many of us remember the news out of Israel on Thanksgiving Day 2023, right after October 7th. And this poem is titled, “Waiting for the Next Release, Reported by the New York Times, November 23 2023”.

Owen Lewis: 

Waiting For the Next Release,

Reported N.Y. Times, Nov. 23, 2023 

 

Maybe tomorrow, if distrust 

doesn't flare like a missile, 

some families will be reunited. 

 

How awful this lottery of choice;

Solomon would not deliberate.

Poster faces always before my eyes,

 

Among them, Emma & Yuli Cunio. 

Twins age 3, Raz Katz-Asher, age 4,

Ariel Bibas, another four year old. 

 

What do their four year old minds make 

of captivity? What will they say?

What would my Noa say? 

 

What will the other Noas say? 

Remembering Noa Argamani, age 26,

 thrown across the motorcycle 

 

to laughter and Hamas joy.

 

I have almost forgotten this American day, 

Thanks-

giving,

 

With its cornucopian harvests, 

I am thinking of the cornucopian 

jails of human bounty. 

 

(What matter now who is to blame?)

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

Really beautiful, and it really captures all of our emotions that day. You have children and grandchildren in Israel, as I mentioned and as you mentioned in that poem, your granddaughter, Noa. So your grief and your fear, it's not only a collective grief and fear that we all share, but also very personal, which you weave throughout the collection. 

In another poem, “In a Van to JFK”, you talk about just wanting to spend one more hour with your family before they fly off to Israel. And it's very moving. 

But in addition to many of the poems, like the one you just read, they are based on and somewhat named for newspaper headlines, you said that kind of establishes a timeline. But are there other reasons why you transformed those headlines into verse?

Owen Lewis: 

Yes, William Carlos Williams in his poem Asphodel, says, and I'm going to paraphrase it badly. You won't get news from poems yet, men die every day for wanting what is found there. And I think it's a very interesting juxtaposition of journalism and poetry. And I mean, I'm not writing news, I'm writing where my reflections, where my heart, goes in response to the news, and trying to bring another element to the news that, you know, we were confronted. 

I mean, in any time of high stress, you swear off – I'm not watching any more TV. I'm not even gonna look at the newspaper. And then, of course, you do. I can't talk about Israel today. I can't not talk about it. I can't read the paper. I can't not read the paper. It's kind of that back and forth. But what is driving that? And so I'm trying to get at that next dimension of what's resonating behind each one of these headlines, or resonating for me. I mean, I'm not claiming this is an interpretation of news. It's my reaction, but people do react, and there's that other dimension to headlines.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

That seems like it might be therapeutic, no?

Owen Lewis: 

Oh, totally, totally. You know, I'm very fortunate that having started a career in medicine, in psychiatry, and particularly in child and adolescent psychiatry. I always had one foot in the door academically. I spent, you know, my life as, I still teach, but I'm very fortunate to have, maybe 10+ years ago, been introduced to a basically a woman who created the field of Narrative Medicine, Rita Sharon. And now at Columbia in the medical school, we have a free-standing Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, of which she's chairman. 

So I've had the fortune of bringing psychiatry and medicine and writing together in a very integrated way. And yes, writing is therapeutic, especially, I could say in medicine, which has given itself over to electronic medical record keeping, but our whole society is moving towards the electronic. And what happens when you sit and write, and what happens when you then sit and read, you reflect. Your mind engages in a different way that is a bit slower than the fast pace of electronic communications and instant communications and instant thinking. And now with AI, instant analysis of any situation you want to feed data from. 

So that's sorely lacking in the human experience. And the act of writing, the act of reading has huge therapeutic values, huge salutary benefits for humans in general, but particularly in times of stress. In a lot of work on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, finding an outlet, an artistic outlet, it doesn't have to be writing, but that's often a way of transcending the trauma. 

And medicine is filled with trauma. People trying to come to terms with acute illnesses, chronic illnesses. Doctors and caregivers trying to come to terms with what they can and can't do. And you know, we're coming up against limitations. But how do you make peace with those limitations? And it's not that it's a magical panacea, but it's a process of engagement, not only with the subject, but with yourself in relation to the subject.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

I mean, I imagine dialogue is really the healthiest way of conversation and speaking through and interacting with a topic. And so I would imagine poetry, or, as you said, any art form, responding to news reports, it makes that a two way conversation when you're able to process and it's not just the headlines shouting at you, you're actually interacting and processing it by writing and reaction, or painting and reaction, whatever you choose to do.

Owen Lewis: 

Exactly.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

You have said that poetry can serve a purpose during times of war. Is this one of the purposes to to be therapeutic or are you talking more in terms of what statesmen could learn from it? 

Owen Lewis: 

Well, yes, of course, what statesmen could learn from it, but it's human nature to want to take sides. I mean, that's kind of just what we do. But I think we can always do better than that. So I'm really talking about the people. I mean, there are also many Jews who are so angry at Israel that they can't listen to the story of Jewish grief. They should be reading mine and others poetries from this era. I wish the Palestinian poets were. I wish the Palestinian people. I mean, of course, in their current situation, they don't have time when you're starving, when you're looking for your next glass of fresh water. You don't have time for anything beyond survival. 

But once we get beyond that, how long are these positions going to be hardened. I mean, I think when the people of all sides of the dilemma really listen to the others, I mean, they're, I mean, if, unless as Hamas has expressed, you know, wants to push Israel into the sea, if Israel is going to coexist with the Palestinian people, whether they're in a nation or not in a nation, each has to listen to the other. 

And it's, you know, it's not one side is right, one side is wrong. It's far too complex a history to reduce it to that kind of simplicity. And I think poetry, everyone's poetry, gets at the complexity of experience, which includes wanting to take sides and questioning your wanting to take sides and moving towards something more humanitarian. 

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

You said earlier, you recommend Abu Toha, Fady Joudah, two Palestinian poets who have written some beautiful verse about– tragically beautiful verse–about what's happening. But there have been some really deep rifts in the literary world over this war. I mean, as you mentioned before, there was a letter written by authors and entertainers who pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions. Some authors have refused to sell rights to their books to publishers in Israel. So why not reciprocate? And I know the answer. I think you've already addressed it pretty well. What's wrong with that approach?

Owen Lewis: 

In any conflict, there are at least three sides to the conflict. I mean, claims to nationhood, claims to who shoved first, who. I mean, you don't entangle things by aggressively reacting. I mean, if we learned anything from Mahatma Gandhi, it's what happens when we don't retaliate, right? And what happens when we go the extra mile to create bridges and connections. 

There are a host of people in Israel who continue to help Palestinians get to medical facilities, driving them back and forth, working for peace. I mean, there's a Palestinian on the Supreme Court of Israel, and well, he should be there. You know, that's the part of Israel that I am deeply proud of. So why not retaliate? I think it entrenches positions and never moves anything forward.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

So have you gotten any negative feedback from your writing colleagues?

Owen Lewis: 

Some cold shoulders, yes. I mean not nothing overtly. I haven't been slammed in a review yet. Maybe that's coming. But when I publish pieces, I tend not to look at them. I had an oped in the LA Times. I've had some other pieces, you know, that precipitates blogs, and I started to read them. 

And the first blog that came off of the the LA Times oped was, God, is he an opportunist, just taking advantage of having a daughter in Israel? And trying to make a name for himself or something. And I said, You know what, you can't put yourself out and take a position without getting some kind of flack. So occasionally, those things filter back, it's par for the course.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

Right, not really worth reading some of those. You included Midrash in this book. You also spelled God in the traditional sense in the poems. Why did you choose to do that?

Owen Lewis: 

Well, I felt it honors a tradition of Jewish writing. It mean we have yud, hey, vav, hey, you know, which in English comes down as Yahweh, but it's unpronounceable. The name of God is unpronounceable. And, you know, yud, hey, vav, hey is just a representation. It isn't God's name. And there's a tradition that the name of God, when it's written down, can't be destroyed. And it's a way of honoring that tradition. Millennium of Jewish writers, you know, it's similar to say Elokim, instead of Elohim when the text is written.

To sort of substitute. We know what we're talking about, but really to honor tradition, to pay respect and sort of to stay in the mind frame that, if there is a God, he, she, they, are unknowable. And somehow it creates, for me, a little bit of that mystery by leaving a letter out. It's like, G, O, D, seems more knowable than G-d. It's leaving that white space right for something bigger, grander, and mysterious, for the presence of that  right in the word itself.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

And what about including Midrash?

Owen Lewis:

That’s a very interesting question. You know Midrash for me, when you steep yourself in traditional Midrash, there's stories that exemplify principles and they fill in gaps. I mean, some of the most important. I mean, we have this notion of Abraham breaking the idols of his father before he left. No. That's Midrash, thats not in the Torah. And yet, nine out of ten Jews will say that's in the Torah, right? So, it kind of expands our understanding of the traditional text.

But it also very much allows a writer to creatively engage with the text and expand it. It's like a commentary, but it's a commentary in story, and it's a commentary in terms that evoke human responses, not necessarily intellectual responses. So frankly, I think it's every Jews’ responsibility to write Midrash. That reinvigorates the stories, the texts, and the meanings, and then we write midrashes upon midrashes. And you know, we get a whole community buzzing about a single story.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

Which is very much what you've done with this collection, you know, writing poetry in response to news stories and engaging it in that way. It's very Jewish response, I would argue. 

Do you observe Tisha B’av?

Owen Lewis: 

You know what I do. You're gonna laugh. My grandmother always warned us, don't go in the water on Tisha B’av, the sea will swallow you up. So I'm a big swimmer. I love swimming. I don't swim on Tisha B’av, because I hear my grandmother's voice, I'm going to be swallowed up.

Manya Brachear Pashman: 

If you could please wrap up this conversation by sharing a poem of your choice from your latest collection.

Owen Lewis: 

A poem I love to read again starts with a headline.

 

2000 Pound Bombs Drop,

Reported N.Y. Times, Dec,, 22 2023.

 

In Khan Younis, the call to prayer 

is the call of a dazed Palestinian child

crying baba, standing at the brim

of a cavernous pit of rubble

 

biting his knuckles–baba, baba . . . 

It's so close to the abba of the dazed 

Israeli children of Be’eri, Kfar Azza.

There is no comfort. From his uncles

 

he's heard the calls for revenge–

for his home and school, for his bed 

of nighttime stories, for his nana’s

 whisper-song of G-d's many names.

 

His Allah, his neighbor’s Adonai, 

cry the same tears for death 

and shun more blood. No miracle these

waters turning red. Who called forth

 

 the fleets of avenging angels? By viral post:

Jewish Plagues on Gaza! A firstborn lost, 

then a second, a third. What other plagues 

pass over? Hail from the tepid sky?

 

From on high it falls and keeps falling. 

Though we've “seen terrible things,”

will you tell us, Adonai, Allah, tell us–

do You remember the forgotten promise?

 

From the pile once home of rubble stone,

a father's hand reaching out, baba, abba

crushed by the load. We know the silence 

of the lost child . . . G-d “has injured us

 

but will bind up our wounds . . .” Mothers 

Look for us, called by the name yamma, calling 

the name imma. Our father of mercy, not the god

of sacrifice. Our many crying heads explode.

Manya Brachear Pashman:  

Owen Lewis, thank you so much for talking to us about how this book came about and for sharing some of these verses.

Owen Lewis:  

Thank you so much.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to listen to my conversation with Israeli comedian Yohay Sponder on the sidelines of AJC Global Forum 2025. Hear how his Jewish identity shapes his work, how his comedy has evolved since the Hamas terror attacks, and what he says to those who try to silence him.