Kisufim, taking place this week at Mishkenot Shaananim, Beit Avichai and Tmol Shilshom in Jerusalem, offers participants an opportunity to discuss some of the most pressing questions regarding Israeli and Jewish literature today. These include Jewish identity in contemporary art, the nature of Jewish literature after the Holocaust, the role of translation in Jewish literature, and confronting the new anti-Semitism in a world that has a Jewish state.

The four days of the conference feature public readings of poetry and prose, as well as discussions and workshops with poets and writers in Russian, English, Spanish, Hungarian, French, Serbian, Romanian, Greek, Italian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish. Each evening will include a gathering of young writers and poets.

Among the participants: Jennifer Barber (USA), Haim Beer (Israel), Michel Eckhard Elial (France), Marcia Falk (USA), Gabi Gleichmann (Hungary-Sweden-Norway), David Grossman (Israel), Ilya Kaminsky (FSU-USA), Etgar Keret (Israel), Kari Klemelä (Finland), Sami Michael (Israel), Myriam Moscona (Mexico), Tomislav Osmanli (Macedonia), Mehmet Yashin (Cyprus-Turkey) and Galina Zelenina (Russia), among others. The founder and artistic director of Kisufim is Hava Pinhas-Cohen.

Kisufim: The Jerusalem Conference for Jewish Writers and Poets sees contemporary Jewish literature as containing the memory of Jewish life and culture after World War II and the destruction of Jewish communities in Arab lands, and seeks to examine the transformations undergone by Jewish culture since then. Previous conferences were held in 2007, 2009 and 2013 and featured participants such as Aharon Appelfeld, Nathan Englander, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Pinsky, Meir Shalev and A.B. Yehoshua.

Kisufim is produced with the participation of the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Jerusalem Municipality, the Matanel Foundation, the Euro-Mediterranean Institute, the Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem Foundation.