In an abundance of caution and in light of rapidly changing information about COVID-19, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies will be postponing our upcoming events through April 2, 2020. We will reevaluate other upcoming spring events as the situation evolves. When we have rescheduled dates we will reach out to you and honor your current ticket options. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to iijs@columbia.edu
Join IIJS for the Miron Lecture on Jewish Literature with Prof. Robert Alter.
Saul Tchernikovsky, one of the major Hebrew poets of the earlier twentieth century, repeatedly invoked pagan themes from the start of his career onward. The lecture will seek to show how this was not simply an ideological gesture but powerfully suggested a deep imaginative involvement in the pagan world, in keeping with Tchernikovsky's vitalist and pantheistic vision of reality. The principal focus will be on the fifteen-poem cycle of sonnets, "To the Sun," written in war-torn Odessa in 1919.
Supported by the generosity of the Knapp Family Foundation.
Co-sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature and Department of Religion.
Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-six published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into ten different languages. Among his publications over the past twenty-five years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000), The Five Book of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004), Imagined Cites (2005), The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007), Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010), The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary (2010), and Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets. His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary has was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 the American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature.