Alan Mintz

Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature and chair of the Department of Hebrew Language at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Mintz joined the JTS faculty in June 2001 after ten years at Brandeis University as the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature. Dr. Mintz's current research centers on Hebrew literature in America and the history of the Hebraist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. He is completing a critical study of twelve Hebrew poets who wrote in America between the two world wars of the twentieth century.

Dr. Mintz is the author, most recently, of Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (University of Washington Press, 2001) and Translating Israel: The Reception of Hebrew Literature in America (Syracuse University Press, 2001), and editor of Reading Hebrew Literature (Brandeis University Press / University Press of New England, 2002). His recent essays include: “In the Seas of Youth: On Agnon’s Bilvav yamim,” “Knocking on Heaven's Gate: Hebrew Literature and Wisse's Canon,” and “Bialik’s Sefer ha’aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?” His major academic works include Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Columbia University Press, 1985), which explores how the Jewish literary imagination has dealt with successive calamities from the destruction of the Temples to the Holocaust, and Banished from Their Father's Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Indiana University Press, 1988), which examines the inner world of intellectuals coming of age in eastern Europe during a period of collapsing religious faith. Dr. Mintz is editor, with Anne Golumb Hoffman, of A Book that Was Lost and Other Stories by S. Y. Agnon (Schocken Books, 1995). He is the editor of Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects (Wayne State University Press, 1993). Dr. Mintz was the founder of Response magazine, which he edited from 1967 through 1970. In 1981, Dr. Mintz cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History with professor of Literature David Roskies. With both Dr. Roskies and Dr. Mintz on the faculty of the same institution, the editorial office of Prooftexts also moved to JTS, enabling the journal to begin its twenty-first year in the premier institution of Jewish study in the United States.