"1943: A World Jewish ReaderandHolocaust Literature: A History"
Professor David G. Roskies, a native of Montréal, earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in near eastern and Judaic studies from Brandeis University. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and Professor of Jewish Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. For his J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship, Professor Roskies complied and edited 1943: A World Jewish Reader for Yale University Press, and began work on Holocaust Literature: A History for the University Press of New England.
Professor Roskies is a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry. He is the author and editor of seven books and dozens of articles, including Night Words: A Midrash on the Holocaust (1971), one of the first liturgies on the subject ever to appear; The Shtetl Book: An Introduction to East European Jewish Life and Lore (1975) which became a standard text book; Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (1984) which won the prestigious Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa, and has since been translated into Russian and Hebrew; The Literature of Destruction (1989); The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky (1992); A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (1995); and The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (1999). His essays on American Jewish writing have appeared in the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003) and Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature (2001).
Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Professor Roskies co-founded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, published by Indiana University Press. He is Editor-in-Chief of the New Yiddish Library, published by Yale University Press and a member of the editorial board of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Professor Roskies’s most recent projects include The Last Yiddish Novel: A Memoir, a study of I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and a synoptic essay, “What Is Holocaust Literature?”
Professor Roskies was in residence at the Mandel Center from January 1 to May 31, 2007.