Belonging and belongings: Jewish poetry in the UK today

What does it mean to be a Jewish poet?  Can a non-Jew, like Micheal O’Siadhail, write about the Holocaust? (See The Gossamer Wall, Bloodaxe 2002).  Maybe the Irish and the Jews have enough in common to be able to immerse themselves in each other’s histories.  Does  a writer and in particular a poet have to belong somewhere before they can write?  Who do their poems belong to?  What part do journals like Jewish Renaissance and the Jewish Quarterly play in keeping alive the identity of Jewish poets and poetry. How important are Jewish poets like Aviva Dautch, Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum in London, who also works with refugees getting them to write poetry?

Liz Cashdan is a poet and teaches Creative Writing for the Open College of the Arts. She is former Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education. She also teaches Creative Writing for the Folk House in Bristol and in schools.  She is Poetry Editor of Jewish Renaissance and in 1996 won the Jewish Quarterly poetry prize with her historical sequence, The Tyre-Cairo Letters based on a fragment from the Cairo Geneza   She has an MA in History from Oxford and a PhD in Literature from Sheffield Hallam University.  Her latest collection is Things of Substance: New and Selected Poems (Five Leaves Publications 2013).