New Book Out Now
Featured on Zibby Owens’ Fall 2025 Most Anticipated List
Going Out with Knots by
Wendy Zierler
Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots illuminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss.
She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet—Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa—in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too.
Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah.
“This book isn’t just a memoir, it’s a friend.”
— Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Good Years
“Going Out With Knots is at once deeply personal, literary, and evocative. This is a book I’ll treasure and give to people I love.”
— Rabbi Rachel Adler, professor emerita at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and author of Engendering Judaism
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About Rabbi Wendy Ilene Zierler, Ph.D.
Wendy Zierler is a rabbi, writer, and a professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at a rabbinical school. Her academic career has been dedicated to teaching modern Hebrew and Jewish literature to future rabbis, cantors and educators. Much of her work argues for the relevance of modern Jewish literary texts to Jewish life and classical learning, and for finding ways for new books to live alongside or inside old ones. Zierler’s scholarship has also entailed translating and interpreting modern Hebrew literature from a feminist and gender studies standpoint, with a focus on Hebrew women poets and prose writersand how they have rewritten and translated the traditional script in the context of women’s experience.
She holds the position of Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College in New York. Prior to joining HUC she was a Research Fellow in the English Department of the University of Hong Kong. She earned a Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University; a B.A. from Stern College of Yeshiva University; and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. In June 2021, she received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva Maharat. She also serves as Co-Editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
As a creative writer she has written a youth novel, entitled, The Return of Gerda Werthheimer and two collections of linked stories.
