Eli Jacobs
Writer and Contributing Editor at Witness Magazine
Unhiding
We didn’t speak about my brother Moshe’s rebellion and rejection of religion, or his alcoholism, or his drugs. We didn’t talk about my brother Danny’s turn away from orthodoxy or his apparent homosexuality. We didn’t talk about Moshe’s cancer or his death when he was thirty-six. We didn’t talk about Danny’s AIDS or his death at the age of thirty-nine.
Instead, we wrote. In diaries and notebooks and on scraps of paper that we hid away in boxes and drawers.
As the youngest child, l learned what may be spoken and what not. And I learned, in wordless lessons, that I must make things right. I fortified myself by attending ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, marrying young and moving to Israel.
Decades after my brothers’ deaths, I divorced, moved out of the West Bank settlement that had been home for 17 years and left religion. It was as if an unseen force was upending my life.
Looking back, I began to understand the cost of silence. Alienation had inflamed my brothers' diseases. And the never-spoken, never-resolved conflict had robbed me of the simplicity of loss.
Seeking comprehension, I retrieved the diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper. My family archive. Our unspoken words. Surely I would uncover a secret, a missing fact, perhaps a betrayal, that would shed light on the darkness. Stumbling along, I established and then refuted one neat narrative after another.
Rather than order, I found contradiction and enigma, pain, suffering, confusion and humanity. The only constant, true for all of us, across all times, was the silence.
My writing is an act of speaking the unspoken and a call for unhiding.
Published
Long, Hard Day
A personal narrative about my brothers’ deaths, family rejection, and the discovery—twenty-three years after Danny died of AIDS—that transformed how I understood him and my own role in our family. Shortlisted for Witness Magazine’s 2020 literary awards in creative nonfiction; published in the Winter 2020 issue.
Counting Rabbis
Lyric essay about living in the shadow of religious doctrine. Published in Eastern Iowa Review, January 2020.
A memoirist-to-memoirist conversation with Israeli-Bedouin filmmaker Rana Abu Fraiha about family secrets and finding one’s own story. Medium, September 2019.
At the intersection of two pandemics
An essay about AIDS, COVID-19, grief, and long-term HIV survivors, viewed through the death of my brother Danny from AIDS. The Times of Israel, 2021.
Palestinian-Israeli Memorial Ceremony: from Alternative to Mainstream?
A personal reflection on an Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony, and how shared grief might bring people on opposite sides together and help break the cycle of violence. The Times of Israel, May 2016.
Being Someone Who Never Existed
Snapdragon Journal, Winter 2019. A piece about whether a mother’s impossible demands on her child carry into the next generation.
Hybrid mini-memoir published in Palaver Journal, Spring 2020. Told through family photographs, short texts, diary entries, letters, and other archival material.
I am a Datlash—and Writing About It
On Religiousness and Irreligiousness. The Times of Israel, 2013.
By My Brother
In Their Own Words: The Beautiful Lives We Lost To AIDS
Danny Jacobs’s first-person account of living with AIDS and finding purpose as a performer with the AIDS Theatre Project, written shortly before his death and published posthumously in The Forward in 2017.
Memoir
A Ferry Going the Other Way: Letters to My Dead Brother
Full-length memoir, complete. Seeking representation/publication.
Publications and Works in Progress
About
Eli Jacobs grew up in New York and moved to Israel at the age of 23. He is the joyous father of six, grandfather of two and loving partner of Becky Kook.
Eli is a contributing editor at Witness Magazine published by Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. He holds an MA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bar Ilan University and an MS in Education from Johns Hopkins University. He writes about his family, loss, mourning and marginalization on the basis of religious or sexual identity. His work has been published in Palaver Journal, Snapdragon and Eastern Iowa Review and his essay, Long Hard Day was short-listed for Witness Magazine's 2020 literary awards in creative nonfiction.
Eli has authored and edited numerous text books for teaching reading comprehension and English grammar.
The working title for Eli's memoir is The Blinding Light of AIDS.
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