Taking off from a 1967 Commentary essay by the scholar Gershom Scholem on the Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon, Jeffrey Saks discusses the Nobel Prize-winning author’s life and work. Among other topics, Saks addresses the role of religion and the Holocaust in Agnon’s stories and novels, the debate among Scholem, Agnon, and the poet Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik over the spiritual significance of the revival of Hebrew, and an Agnon-loving professor in Saudi Arabia. (Interview by Alan Rubenstein. Audio, 48 minutes. Options for download and streaming are availalbe at the link below.)
Read more on Tikvah: https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-jeffrey-saks-shmuel-yosef-agnon/