The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry

Reading Hebrew Literature: Critical Discussions of Six Modern Texts

Alan Mintz, ed.

Cover of "Reading Hebrew Literature: Critical Discussions of Six Modern Texts"

Six classic texts of modern Hebrew literature viewed from a variety of critical perspectives.

"Reading Hebrew Literature" explores the many ways Israeli literature is read in the United States. In it, 18 preeminent Hebrew literature scholars in the United States and Israel offer commentary — traditional, historicist, feminist, postmodern — on one of six seminal texts. The texts, printed here in both English and Hebrew, are either short stories or poems, and range from "old" classics by the best-known writers in Hebrew of the first decades of the 20th century, such as M.Y. Berdichevsky, S. Tchernichovsky and S.Y. Agnon to an interwar poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg to the contemporary, modernist work of two women authors, Amalia Cahana-Karmon and Dalia Ravikovitch.

Alan Mintz's general introduction explains the genesis and development of modern Hebrew literature, its reception in U.S. universities and the rationale for selecting this particular group of texts.

Contributors:

  • Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley

  • Arnold J. Band, University of California, Los Angeles

  • Nancy Berg, Washington University, St. Louis

  • William Cutter, Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles

  • Aminadav Dykman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  • Lewis Glinert, Dartmouth College

  • Nili Gold, University of Pennsylvania

  • Anne Golomb Hoffman, Fordham University

  • Hannan Hever, Tel Aviv University

  • Avner Holtzman, Tel Aviv University

  • Chana Kronfeld, University of California, Berkeley

  • Dan Laor, Tel Aviv University

  • Barbara Mann, Princeton University

  • Alan Mintz, Jewish Theological Seminary

  • Gilead Morahg, University of Wisconsin, Madison

  • Hannah Naveh, Tel Aviv University

  • David Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary

  • Naomi Sokoloff, University of Washington

About the Author

Alan Mintz is the Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His books include "Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in America" (2001) and "The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction" (UPNE, 1997).