This Purim, we turn to Robert Alter’s excellent new translation, “Strong as Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel.” Alter writes that the Book of Esther, unlike any other book of the Bible, seems to have been written primarily for entertainment.

This week we feature a novel told in a series of vignettes, narrated by three young Israeli women following their high school years in a small northern village and through their enlistment in the Israeli Defence Force where they train marksmen, guard a border and man a checkpoint.

In this week’s episode, we will consider Israeli Love poetry through the lens of Barbara Goldberg’s new book, “Transformation: The Poetry of Translation,” which has just come out this year, after winning the Valentin Krustev Award for Translation.

An introduction to the genre called “Auto-Reality,” a term coined by Israeli writer and editor Rana Werbin to describe her first book, “Life Is Good.”

Aharon Appelfeld would say that in order to be a serious writer you need to have a routine. For years his routine had been to write in the café at Ticho House, in Jerusalem. It was there that Alain Elkann interviewed him for The Paris Review.

We feature poetry by Ron Dahan and Sharron Hass from the new “Crisis” issue of The Ilanot Review, which was edited by guest editor Adriana X. Jacobs, and our very own Marcela Shulak.

Marcela features some of her favorite poems from the recent poetry issue of The Ilanot Review, which has just gone live this week.

We widen our focus and step beyond our local boundaries to acknowledge the civil war in Syria through the writings of Golan Haji. The excerpted essay was written five and a half years ago, when the Syrian war was well into its second year.

Noam Partom’s poetry calls out sexual predators and chides herself for allowing men to define her sense of worth. She isn’t afraid to say what is largely left unsaid, out of politeness, out of the distasteful thing it is to name what we know exists but which we leave unsaid.

This episode is the second in our two-part long-good-bye to the extraordinary writer, Amos Oz. Marcela provides a long excerpt from “Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land,” translated by Jessica Cohen. The excerpt comes from the essay “Many Lights, Not one Light.”