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Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) : Jewish Poet, British
Rosenberg, an Anglo-Jew killed in the trenches of World War I, was not the stereotypical “British patriot.” Brilliant, experimental, he wrote “Jewishly” throughout: on slum life in London, his mythic need to play David's harp (as with Marion Moss), his bitter consciousness of bigotry in the military (as with his American counterpart Louis Untermeyer), and the power of the Balfour Declaration (1917) to inspire ideas of a Jewish world rebuilt in Palestine.
A painter whose visual imagination marks much of his bold, sensuous writing, Rosenberg argued with the Jews' God---yet represents most fully the problem of being committed to Jewish ethnicity in a Christian world. His poems on King David and on the Babylonian Captivity are major contributions to English literature.
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