Writers and Poets Run Israeli Newspaper

By Jason Boog 

newspaper23.jpgIsrael’s oldest newspaper surprised 50,000 readers this week, giving the paper’s journalists a vacation–turning over the newspaper to writers and poets.

In honor of Hebrew Book Week, Dov Alfon, editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Haaretz, contracted a number of famous Israeli authors to write the paper’s normal sections. According to Forward, the results were interesting, to say the least.

Here’s more from the article: “The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: ‘I didn’t watch TV yesterday.’ And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled ‘Summer Sonnet’ … David Grossman, one of Israel’s most famed novelists, spent a night at a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients.”