*Wandering Jews - My Speech at the President's Wife Prize for Poetry | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 7, 2026*
On Monday, I received the President's Wife Prize for Poetry in a grand, formal state ceremony. It is quite a moment in a poet's life, a moment so immense that, in order to contain it, I tried to make it as small as I possibly could. I focused on the makeup artist's instructions: Don't sweat in the sun. Don't cry. I managed the sun. But as for the second instruction, I couldn't stop sobbing..
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I wrote the speech I gave there for my grandmother. You'll understand why in a moment. Sometimes, while I was writing, I imagined my family sitting in the audience, listening. I imagined the President's wife, and the President himself. Even though I knew there would be many other people in the audience, and that the speech would also be broadcast on television, somehow, as I wrote it, in my heart I was speaking only to my grandmother, my family, and the President's wife.
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But since then, this speech, which I wrote as though it were something private, has taken on a life of its own. People have asked to translate it into different languages. They've asked to send it around the world. People have written to me. They've called me. So this week I'm breaking my usual custom and placing it here instead of my column, or perhaps as the column itself. Besides, I was asked to speak for about seven minutes, so it almost fits anyway 🙂
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This is what I said:
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"Immediately after October 7, I called my grandmother Rivka. I was in the United States. Antisemitism had exploded around me, and everyone kept saying it was just another wave, that it would pass. I knew my grandmother would understand immediately. After all, throughout my childhood she told me the stories. As a child, I listened politely. I thought they were just bubbe meises. On October 7, I realized I had understood nothing. My grandmother hadn't repeated those stories over and over again because she was anxious. She had an urgent mission: to pass on what she knew, and to make sure I understood and remembered that being a Jew in this world can be precarious, bewildering, unpredictable, and impossible to explain. Looking back, my grandmother had been preparing me for this moment my entire life.
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Out of those conversations with her, there in America, I began writing about antisemitism. Jews from South Africa, England, France, and Australia read my words and began writing to me. Synagogues and conferences across the United States invited me to speak. In every one of those journeys, my grandmother came with me. She held my hand. She had been dead for eleven years. It made no difference. The stories she had told me had prepared me for this moment. And the words I wrote carried forward what she had entrusted to me.
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That is where *The Wandering Jewess* began to be written. Between one Jewish community and another. When I went from being an international Israeli to being a Jew. When I rejoined the Jewish, Hebrew tribe into which I had been born. And when I felt, in my own body, the wandering from which I myself had come.
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Because all of us were born from people who had built lives and were forced to bundle them for the road. Those who settled somewhere for generations only to discover that even home was not truly home. Those who fled the homes they left behind, and those who stayed while home itself slipped away beneath their feet. Those who left in time, and those who were pushed onto the road at the very last moment. We are descended from the fortunate ones who survived the journey, survived history's long roads, and gathered themselves together, remnant upon remnant, until they became whole again. And so, in every one of us, there beats the memory of the leap from the train, the run through the forest, the hand gripping the door handle, the heart dropping in fear, but also the spirit that grows stronger, survives, improvises, and stubbornly chooses life.
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My grandmother wandered for six years along roadsides and through hidden farms as she crossed Europe and Central Asia on her way to Israel. Those were supposed to be the most beautiful years of her life. She loved opera and theater, and she loved being at home. Until she died, just short of her hundredth birthday, she regretted only one thing: that she had never gone to university.
What would you have studied, Grandma?
Literature.
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Instead, she read every book in the library of Kibbutz Kinneret.
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In my grandfather's tailor shop in the Kibbutz,hung a single picture: a thin chromolithograph print that came free with the newspaper. First it was President Katzir. Then Yitzhak Navon. Then Herzog. Every time Israel had a new president, my grandfather would take down the previous one. "Why do you need the President hanging above you in a tailor shop?" I asked him as a little girl. Between the bolts of fabric, the scissors, the paper patterns, what did the President have to do with any of it?
B’ecause whoever has a president has a home," my grandfather said.
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And that is the other side of wandering: when you have a home, you never take it for granted. As thin as a newspaper scrap. You hold it the way you hold anything precious whose days may be numbered. Especially when that home itself is fragile, easily torn, and demands constant care for the place and for those who live within it. And when you meet someone from your own tribe, whether in a newspaper clipping or in the flesh, you fall into each other's arms in the midst of strangers. It doesn't matter where in the world you are. In that moment, there are no strangers. In that moment, both of you are home.
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At the very moment Israel rose to the top of the list of the world's most hated countries, I fell in love with my Hebrew tribe, with my wandering Jewish people, with the generations before me, and with those still to come. And I finally understood what Rabbi Sacks meant when he said that Judaism brought ordinary people to live extraordinary lives.
We are the ordinary people.
We are the ones living extraordinary lives.
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Today, as I receive this prize, countless invisible hands reach out with mine to accept it. The gentle hands of my grandmother Rivka, who never had the chance to study literature. The long hands of my grandfather Yaakov, who stitched garments with the president hovering above him. My grandmother Leika, who asked me when I first began writing poetry, "Why do you need all this?" And my grandfather Yaakov, who fled at seventeen and immediately enlisted to defend the Yishuv. And also the hands of their parents, and of the generations before them, who crossed borders from Lithuania to Belarus. From Belarus to Ukraine. From Ukraine to Russia. From Russia to Kazakhstan. From Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. From Uzbekistan to Poland. From Poland to Italy. From Italy to Israel. All of them wandering Jews. And I am their daughter.
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And I will close with the poem that opens the book:
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How / Maya Tevet Dayan
How did the Jewess land on me?
I was in America, in an RV,
on my way to a festival in the desert.
I didn’t know it was Shabbat, or a holiday. How did
the fear land on me? Suddenly an ancient people,
An entire history landed on me. On the perfect streets
and palm-lined beaches I understood how any landscape
can turn into camps and fences.
It made sense. How did it make sense to me? How come
I begun to say sentences like ‘there’s nothing new
under the sun’, and ‘in every generation’? How did this generation
land on me? Hollow stares, parades. And where did
the Star of David land on me from? A woman from New York
gave it to me, on a large ring. She said
this is what binds us. She said it in English,
and in Jewish. How did Jewish women land on me? Strangers, new ones,
dead ones, surfing, cooking. I was never one of them.
I didn’t know any of this. The world was
large and open, and I was
all directions. How did
the world close in on me?
I have no alley left to breathe.
I move from place to place, on my shoulders, a people, heavyweight,
in my pupils the ancient fear, on my finger
a Star of David. I could take all of this off,
and I cannot.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*