Burn the challah, a Jewish poetry manifesto

...let the herring spoil and the matzoh ball soup boil over, too. Yosefa Raz, the poetry editor at Zeek, a journal of Jewish thought, argues that a cultural or historical reference does not a Jewish poem make in "No More Challah: A Zeek Poetry Manifesto."  Raz and crew put the kibosh on cliche-reliant poetry, suggesting that "Jewish poets" writing of the "Jewish experience" fails to do justice to modern Semitic poets and their poems:

A poem can wander–undercover, unrecognizable. We wonder if walking through the old central bus station in Tel Aviv, with its Sudanese refugees, male Filipino prostitutes and refurbished refrigerators, counts as a “Jewish Experience.”

Each poem doesn’t need to carry a passport anymore, announcing itself anxiously at the border: “I come from here.”

Rather, the manifesto demands that poets drop the cultural crutches so poems can walk on their own two feet. The manifesto continues:  

We are the new Diaspora. We live in Rome, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Paris, New York, West Virginia. We read Hebrew, Yiddish, Persian, Greek, Russian, Aramaic, Urdu. We translate because we live in translation, not to create fetish objects. A translated poem, a translated poet, is not an animal at the zoo.

And with that, Raz calls for poems (that don't reference the dinner table).