Writing at the Intersection of Black and Jewish Identity

What do children inherit when they inherit trauma — and how does a writer hold two heritages in a single sentence without resolving them? In this class, Shamar Hill reads from his memoir-in-progress, In Defiance of All True Things, which moves through the spaces where Black and Jewish identity collide, contradict, and illuminate each other. Together we'll open a craft conversation on the questions the work raises: how to write inherited violence without sentimentality, when autobiography becomes art, and how to write one's own family honestly. Along the way we'll consider what the beit midrash already knows about this work — that midrash is literature, and that reading sacred text and writing dual heritage share the same discipline: holding contradiction without surrendering to it.

Open to writers and readers alike; no writing experience or preparation required.

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Shamar Hill is a Cave Canem fellow, poet, and memoirist whose writing mentor was E.L. Doctorow. His work has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, and Washington Square Review. He is at work on a memoir, In Defiance of All True Things. He has taught creative writing at NYU, The New School, and Hunter College, and to incarcerated youth. He is the founder of Machshavah, an initiative reviving the Jewish intellectual salon, whose sold-out inaugural panel at the 92nd Street Y featured Van Jones, Abigail Pogrebin, Mijal Bitton, and Ari'el Stachel. He studies Torah and Talmud weekly and lives in NJ with his wife and three children.