Books by Benjamin Harshav

This remarkable volume introduces what is probably the most coherent segment of twentieth-century American literature not written in English. Includes a bilingual facing-page format, notes and biographies of poets, and selections from Yiddish theory and criticism.

This book on culture and consciousness in history concerns the worldwide transformations of Jewish culture and society and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language following the waves of pogroms in Russia in 1881.

Deals with two remarkable events - the worldwide transformations of the Jews in the modern age and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. This is a book about social and cultural history addressed not only to the professional historian, and a book about Jews addressed not only to Jewish readers.

The book provides a lucid and systematic theory of the work of literature and its major aspects.

This book is a collection of seminal essays on major aspects of Jewish culture: Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Europe, America and Israel, transformations of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the formal traditions of Hebrew verse.

With a combination of erudition and insight, this work investigates the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture, showing where Yiddish came from and what it has to offer, even as it ceases to be a living language.

In this unparalleled study of the forms of Hebrew poetry, preeminent authority Benjamin Harshav examines Hebrew verse during three millennia of changing historical and cultural contexts. He takes us around the world of the Jewish Diaspora, comparing the changes in Hebrew verse as it came into contact with the Canaanite, Greek, Arabic, Italian, German, Russian, Yiddish, and English poetic forms. Harshav explores the types and constraints of free rhythms, the meanings of sound patterns, the historical and linguistic frameworks that produced the first accentual iambs in English, German, Russian, and Hebrew, and the discovery of these iambs in a Yiddish romance written in Venice in 1508/09. In each chapter, the author presents an innovative analytical theory on a particular poetic domain, drawing on his close study of thousands of Hebrew poems.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture.