Hebrew literature
An author who upended his own parables.
Aḥad Ha’am on Zionism and Israel.
A member of the Rothschild family finds himself in a small shtetl for the Sabbath.
S. Y. Agnon in English.
Elsewhere than Zion, said the greatest Hebrew poet of the 19th century—until he changed his mind, paving the way for others.
The death of his brother in 1041 moved Shmuel Hanagid, one of Jewish history’s most extraordinary figures, to write nineteen piercing poems charting the rise and fall of his grief.
The enigma of Avraham Ḥalfi.
“The Etrog,” newly rendered into English.
The second Hebrew novelist was the first to imagine the pageantry and passion of life in ancient Israel—and thereby excited the dreams of emergent Zionists.
Is acknowledging terror too much to ask?
The daughter of S.Y. Agnon, and the guardian of his legacy.
In 1819, Joseph Perl published Hebrew literature’s first novel. A riotous satire of the ḥasidic movement, it remains largely and unjustly forgotten.
A powerful new film, available online, shows us the man who more than any other shaped the modern Hebrew language.