Joy Ladin (born March 24, 1961, in Rochester, New York) is an American poet, literary scholar, and the former David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. She was the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution.
Ladin earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University.
In 2007, she received tenure at Yeshiva University and subsequently announced her gender transition. With legal support from Lambda Legal, she returned to her position in 2008.
As of 2018, Ladin has published nine books of poetry, including The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something (2017), Impersonation (2015), The Definition of Joy (2012), Psalms (2010), Coming to Life (2010), Transmigrations (2009), The Book of Anna (2007), and Alternatives to History (2003).
Her poetry often explores themes of identity, transformation, and spirituality, drawing from Jewish texts and traditions.
In 2012, Ladin published her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
She has also been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been featured on NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett.
Ladin's work bridges the worlds of poetry, Jewish scholarship, and transgender identity, offering profound insights into the human experience.Today we will read her three poems.
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| Joy Ladin |
A Modest Proposal
Let’s not kill or die today.
Let’s make angels out of yarn, men of snow, mashed potato animals
that smile as we spoon
their eyes of melted butter.
Instead of killing ourselves or one another,
let’s neatly stack anxiety’s sweaters
and scratch our itchy trigger fingers
by whittling turtles for our mothers,
or pretending to understand Heidegger,
or imagining the sexual embrace through
which time and space
first conceived of matter.
If we still aren’t over killing and dying,
we can search the stacks for library books
that haven’t circulated in generations
and savor the mold
that spores their spines
the way wine snobs savor the nose
of vintage wines bottled
between wars to end all wars.
Look, we’ve played all day
and haven’t spilled a drop of blood
apart from the occasional paper cut.
In an hour or two, when it’s very dark,
let’s make up stories out of stars,
and fill them with all the killing and dying
we didn’t do today, except in our imaginations.
Let’s pull our comforters over our heads
and sing ourselves to sleep
like good little civilizations.
Making Love
I reach for God
and brush your breast,
reach for you
and brush God
dangling and tipped,
gathered over years
of concealment and revelation
into this teardrop of flesh
spilling toward my lips.
I don’t know
what is entering me.
I don’t know what I’ve entered,
or when God became
a shudder of pleasure,
compressing the universe’s exploding center
into this triangle of desire
so that touching you
is touching God
swaddled in arms and legs,
shy as a new-made planet
you and I, breath-filled clay,
were created to inhabit.
The Whiteness of Love
I remember the whiteness of my mother`s love,
the coupon-clipping whiteness
of her lower-middle-class love,
the brown round injustice
of the pennies she clutched
in the white-knuckled fingers
of love. The white house
on the all-white street
of the all-white neighborhood
of our love. The whiteness
of her childhood Depression
and the whiteness of mine
shone like lights in a closet
we dared not open.
No one could look
at the motions we went through
and say they saw anything
but whiteness and love.
Even when we were alone,
whiteness kept us under surveillance.
Eyes disguised as carpet stains
watched my mother and I rehearse
the whiteness that was to me
invisible as love.
I played a child playing a child,
my mother a mother
stirring milk, vanilla, sugar and flour
into cupcake batter,
mixing the ingredients
of our white, white world
into the whiteness of love
