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Israeli poetry helps Lena Dunham find her Judaism

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Lena Dunham has reconnected to her Judaism though the verse of modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

The Jewish actress and Emmy-winning creator, writer and star of the HBO series, Girls, confessed to her 3.2 million followers on Instagram that the poet had made it possible for her to move “beyond bagels, sample sales and crushing guilt”.

The actress whose father is Protestant and mother is Jewish, has always described herself as “culturally Jewish.”

In the post on erev Yom Kippur, Ms Dunham wrote: “This past year a special person helped me connect to my Judaism in a new way.”

It was after the death of her grandmother that the actress felt a “desire to understand what the religion that meant so much to her had to offer her granddaughter, even if my world view is far less cleanly structured than hers.”

“While I’ve learned a lot, I haven’t started going to temple. I haven’t married a lawyer. But I have fallen in love with the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and I am sorry to anyone I wronged this year (except for some people on Twitter)”.

In the post she included the image of Amichai’s poem “People Use Each Other” in English and in Hebrew.

Her followers expressed their appreciation for the post  by wishing the star “shana tova”.

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