Admiel Kosman


Admiel Kosman is an Israeli poet and professor of Talmud.

Biography

Admiel Kosman was born in Haifa, Israel to an Orthodox Jewish family. His father hailed from a German Jewish family living in France, and his mother immigrated from Iraq. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces in an artillery unit and attending Yeshivat Hakotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, he studied graphic art and pottery at the Bezalel [Academy of Art and Design]. He did his Ph.D. in Talmud at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.
Kosman has four children from his first marriage.
Since relocating to Berlin, Kosman is a professor of Religious and Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam and the academic director of Abraham Geiger Reform Rabbinical Seminary.
Kosman is the author of eight books of poetry. His poems often deal with the tension between his religious faith and artistic sensibilities. Kosman has also written three volumes of post-modern scholarship on gender in traditional Jewish texts. In 2000, he was invited by Nobel Prize–winning Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska to participate in an interfaith festival in Kraków, Poetry – between Prayer and Song.

Awards

Kosman has been awarded national prizes for poetry including:

Published work

Poetry

  • And Then the Act of Poetry, 1980
  • The Prince's Raiment, 1988
  • Soft Rags, 1991
  • What I Can, 1995
  • We Reached God, 1998
  • Forty Love Poems and Two Additional Love Poems to God, 2003
  • Proscribed Prayers, Siddur Alternativi, Seventy One New Poems), Hakibutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv 2007
  • You’re Awesome!, Hakibutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv 2011
  • Approaching You in English: Selected Poems of Admiel Kosman, translated by Lisa Katz and Shlomit Naim-Naor

Books and articles

  • Gender and Dialogue in the Rabbinic Prism
  • "The Story of a Giant Story - The Winding Way of Og King of Bashan in the Jewish Aggadic Tradition", in: Hebrew [Union College Annual|HUCA] 73, pp. 157–190.
  • Ergon, Würzburg 2009.
  • "Two Women Who Were Sporting with Each Other": A Reexamination of the Halakhic Approaches to Lesbianism as a Touchstone for Homosexuality in General,, HUCA 75,, pp. 37–73
  • Men’s Tractate: Rav and the Butcher and other Stories – On Manhood, Love and Authentic Life in Aggadic and Hassidic Stories, Keter, Jerusalem 2002
  • . Musings and meditations on close to a century's worth of discussions occasioned by Van Gogh's series of paintings of worn shoes. Was the artist's statement primarily aesthetic, or political, or was it religious? In: Ha-Aretz