In this page, I honor the memory of scholarly and literary authors whose work had significantly shaped the Jewish Studies field. The list does not claim to be exhaustive.
One of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, Meir Shalev (1948–2023), was born in the north Israeli moshav (village) Nahalal and died recently in the cooperative village Alonei Abba, in the Lower Galilee. At the beginning of his career, he had held a weekly column in the daily Haaretz, which he transferred to the popular newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He was a well-known television personality, and, after his fortieth birthday, he began his career as a literary author. His books, some of which he wrote for adults and others for children, appeared in over twenty languages. A number of his books are available from Woodruff library in Hebrew and English. His Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible's Intriguing Firsts, published in English in 2011, is available from Pitts library. Oxford library holds his novel A Pigeon and a Boy.
Deploying magical realism and through his unmistakable playfulness and transportive imagery, Shalev’s first novel Roman rusi (רומן רוסי), translated to English as The Blue Mountain, pays a tribute to the history of the Second Aliyah (immigration to Palestine, after 1948, Israel). It brought immediate acclaim to Shalev, making him the eminent chronicler of the history of this generation and the early agricultural settlements. The title, a play on the twofold meaning of the word “roman” in Hebrew and Russian, as a novel and a romantic relationship, is in itself an homage to the generation who chose to speak Hebrew, but could not always shake off thinking in Russian. These ideologically motivated Zionist pioneers, mostly Eastern European immigrants, arrived in Ottoman Palestine between the years 1904 and 1914. Shalev grew up among the members of this group; their stories fascinated and inspired him to create their fictitious portraits. He highlighted not only their commitment to the Zionist cause but also their emotional and mental fragility, which often posed a bigger threat to their mission than the forces of the outside world: the swamps breathing malaria and other illnesses, the lack of resources to develop “Hebrew Labor,” wild animals lurking around the new settlements, or the conflicts with the local Arab population. The narrator of The Blue Mountain, Baruch, was born in the imagined pioneer village—like Shalev. Baruch is the grandson of one the founders, and he relates stories he heard from his grandfather and other members of the community. With irony and fine detail, he narrates the history of the family and the village spanning throughout the first half of the twentieth century and unfolding across the landscape of the Jezreel Valley, the site of the founders’ mythological deeds.
Four Meals also known as The Loves of Judith is the English translation of Shalev’s fourth novel. Its original title in Hebrew, Keyamim ahadim (כימים אחדים) that is “like a few days,” invokes Genesis 29:20: “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.” It hints on Shalev’s interest in the Hebrew Bible, which was the focus of some of his other books, too. Unfolding in the course of several decades, in late Mandatory Palestine and the young State of Israel, Four Meals tells the stories of three men and their passion and affection for Judith, the mother of Zayde, the narrator of the novel. The stories draw complex and delicate portraits of the inhabitants of yet another fictional village, which nonetheless thoroughly resembles the pioneering agricultural settlements of Israel. As Israel becomes ever more distant from the time, ideals, and values of the Second Aliyah, Shalev’s work becomes increasingly significant for its chronicling the stories of the founders replacing the pathos they created around their history with awe and humor.
Shlomo Avineri (1933–2023) was born in Poland and lived in Mandatory Palestine and Israel since 1939, after he immigrated there as a child with his parents. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became a professor of Political Science, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was invited to teaching to several American and European universities and he was a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences. A leading authority on the oeuvres of Karl Marx and Theodor Herzl, and Hegel’s philosophy while also influential as a historian of Zionism and Socialism, in addition to his scholarly engagements, Avineri served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as director general between 1975 and 1977. He resigned following the Likud Party’s electoral victory in 1977. He was a vocal public intellectual, a commentator on Israel’s current affairs contributing to academic publications and non-academic journals alike. He received the Israel Prize and the AMT Prize. Remembering him on the day of his passing on December 1, 2023, the Israeli daily Haaretz, to which he regularly contributed, quoted him noting that he was among the few Israelis who did not have a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Emory’s collections, the following of Avineri’s books are available: Herzl : Theodore Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State (2013); מלחמה ושלום (2010, ed.);Moses Hess, Prophet of Communism and Zionism (1985); The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (1981); The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1968).
Amira Hess (1943–2023) was born in Baghdad and arrived in Israel as a child with her family in 1951. She was a celebrated Israeli poet, who is considered a pioneer of Mizrahi Feminism, a title she disliked. The modern Arab literary magazine Banipal (Autumn-Winter 2021) in the in the UK featured her along with other Israeli authors with Iraqi roots and stressed that among her ancestors were a famous kabbalist, poets and, in the seventeenth century, a female scholar. An excerpt from her first book And the Moon Drips Madness in Ammiel Alcalay’s translation illustrates how she ascribed importance to her Iraqi roots: There was a time/ when I’d have said:/ I won’t defile myself/ with this contemptible Orient,/ I’ll relegate my ancestral/ home to oblivion, … In her Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, the literary scholar Lital Levy underlined Hess’s fluid treatment of the historical layers of the Hebrew language, that she freely transgressed the linguistic boundaries of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and not least, Hess’s identification as an Iraqi Jew. (Levy, 247)
Hess’s first book, the above quoted And the Moon is Dripping Madness was published when she was 41 years old, in 1984 and won the Luria Prize. She published six volumes, the last in 2021. She received the Prime Minister’s Prize in 2005 and the Amichai Prize for Poetry in 2015. She also worked in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the Government Press Office. For a detailed list of her works, see the Ohio State University's Lexicon of Modern Hebrew Literature.
In Emory Libraries, three of her books are available in Hebrew:
שני סוסים על קו האור: שירים (1987) בולע האינפורמציה (1993) כמו בכי שאין לו עיניים להיבכות (2014)
A founder of the scholarly field Latin American Jewish Studies, Judith Laikin Elkin passed away in January 2024. Her academic path was unique, illustrating how experiences from outside academia enrich scholarly production whether in the form of scholarship or administration and organization. Professor Elkin was a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. In an obituary, her family underlined that years before the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, she worked as a Foreign Service Officer, serving in various posts around the world. Upon her return to the U.S., she contributed articles on foreign affairs to the Detroit Free Press and Toledo Blade and based on her experiences working outside the U.S., she wrote in her memoir Krishna Smiled Assignment in Southeast Asia, published in 1972. She earned her Ph. D. at the University of Michigan in 1976, which was the foundation of her first book Jews of the Latin American Republics (1980). Collecting sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and other languages from archives and by travelling to Latin America, she aimed to make visible the Latin American Jewish diaspora, marginalized by scholars of Latin America and Jewish Studies alike. This book served as a basis for the subsequent The Jews of Latin America, which was updated, newly prefaced, and published several times. It remains the unchallenged foundational textbook for every student who wishes to engage with the field. Prof. Elkin was also the founder of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA), for years also serving as an editor of its newsletter. In 2016, she wrote about LAJSA’s history and published another memoir Walking Made my Path. During these years, Prof. Elkin was also holding faculty and administrative positions at various universities, among them University of Michigan’s Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, where she has been an associate since 1989. She also served as a consulting historian on several exhibitions.
Sami Michael, the Israeli author and activist—president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) since 2001—passed away on April 1, 2024. His literary work included novels for young adults and adults alike, textbooks, and translations. He published twenty-one books. His novels are not only popular but were also incorporated into the Israeli public education curriculum and form an integral part of the country’s literary canon. Emory Libraries hold a selection of his books, both in the original Hebrew and in English translation, as well as movies based on his writings.
He was born as Kamal Salah Menashe in Baghdad, Iraq, on August 15, 1926. At the age of fifteen, he joined a Communist underground group, an experience he described in his novel A Handful of Fog. He fled arrest to Iran, where he changed his name, and a year later, in 1949, he continued to Israel. He remembered his childhood and young adulthood in Iraq defined by political oppression. As a member of a religious minority, he found close allies among other religious groups fighting for civil liberties and he carried his social sensitivity, sense of solidarity, and commitment to the struggle for social justice to his new country, the young Jewish state. “From a member of a persecuted minority, I turned into one of the majority in whose midst lived an oppressed minority. Just as earlier I had to apologize for being Jewish, now I had to apologize for being an Israeli,” he said in 1984 (Michael and Goldstein 26). First, he settled in Jaffa and later he moved to Haifa, where he worked for the Arab newspaper Al-Ittihad under the Palestinian author Emil Habibi’s editorship. In Haifa, he studied psychology and Hebrew literature at the university. He began writing in Hebrew after his graduation. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he left the Communist Party in 1955, while staying his course as a social commentator and continuing to support the struggle for social justice in Israel. Not only was he an influential critique of the bias toward and mistreatment of Jews from Arab lands, but also an early advocate of an independent Palestinian state. In an interview to the newspaper Haaretz on the occasion of receiving the S. Y. Agnon prize in 2018, he said “Culture’s main task is to shine bright light on ignorance, villainy, and corruption. I will always fight what is likely to drag us into the abyss, because I came from there: Iraq before Saddam Hussein. There, the authorities imprisoned and executed those who refused to submit themselves to their culture dictates.” (Haaretz, December 1, 2018)
Sami Michael and Imre Goldstein, “On Being an Iraqi-Jewish Writer in Israel,” Prooftexts 4, no. 1 (1984): 23—33.