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Lazarre Seymour Simckes


Lazarre Seymour Simckes is an award-winning playwright, novelist, educator, Hebrew-English translator, and psychotherapist. He has developed approaches to the use of creative writing in areas including prison therapy and cross-cultural communication between students in the Middle East.

Simckes, descended from a long line of rabbis (including his father Herbert Isaac Simckes, grandfather Mnachem Risikoff and great-grandfather Zvi Yosef Resnick), was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, and raised in Boston. He is a graduate of Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Stanford University (Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow, M.A.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.). He has taught at colleges and universities throughout the United States including Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Brandeis and Tufts, as well as at Bar-Ilan and the University of Haifa in Israel. He has also conducted live, interactive writing workshops via satellite linking middle school and high school students across the country, including the Virgin Islands. During his Fulbright year at the University of Haifa, he conducted a similar workshop linking Israeli Arab and Jewish high school students with their counterparts in America ("Celebrating Differences").

His first play, Seven Days of Mourning (adapted from his novel published by Random House), was staged on Broadway at Circle in the Square. Clive Barnes called it "spiky, yet intensely moving. A Fiddler on the Roof without music, but with blood. Unique, wild, funny. It still haunts me." He wrote the off-off-Broadway play Ten Best Martyrs of the Year, a Theater for the New City (TNC) production directed by Crystal Field, about the ten rabbis who were tortured to death in Rome for supporting the revolt led by Bar Kokhbah in 2nd century Palestine. Simckes said of that play, “I tend to make tragic comment in a mixture of styles. So what did I do? I wrote a play as if through the eyes of Hadrian, the Roman emperor, watching the genocide of the Jews from his balcony.” The play was reviewed by Michael Smith in The Village Voice as "timeless, mythic, enlivened by all kinds of stylistic intrusions and an almost hysterical inventiveness."


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