Michael Weingrad

Letters to America presents the life and work of an accomplished Jewish poet who exchanged the American promised land for the Israeli one, yet struggled to exorcise the ghosts of his American past and make his home in the Jewish state. Born Robert Reiss in 1930s New York, in 1959 Reuven Ben-Yosef bade farewell to his affluent, assimilated family, immigrated to a kibbutz on Israel's border with Syria, changed his name, and began the process of recreating...