Voices of Jewish Literary Giants: Hayim Nahman Bialik and Philip Roth
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Book Talk
In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free |
Philip Roth and Hayim Nahman Bialik are some of the most celebrated writers in contemporary Jewish literature. In his newly published biography of Roth (1933–2018), Philip Roth: Stung by Life, Steven J. Zipperstein explores the complex life and astonishing work of one of America’s most celebrated novelists. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Roth wrote with relentless ambition, producing a wide-ranging body of work—from Goodbye, Columbus to American Pastoral—that grappled with sex, identity, and American Jewishness. Simultaneously charismatic and reclusive, Roth lived, in his own words, like an “unchaste monk,” obsessively committed to the craft of writing.
In On the Slaughter, translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) emerges with renewed force. Born in a Ukrainian village and hailed by Maxim Gorky as “a modern Isaiah,” Bialik transformed Hebrew literature, bridging traditional Jewish thought with modern humanism. This compact collection reveals a poet far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his image as a national icon suggests—ranging from furious responses to pogroms to luminous introspection and children’s verse.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Zipperstein and Cole about the enduring legacies of Roth and Bialik.
Buy Philip Roth: Stung by Life.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author and editor of nine books; his most recent is Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/WW Norton) named a book of the year by The Economist and shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award and the Mark Lytton Prize as the best non-fiction book of 2018.
Peter Cole is the author of six books of poems—most recently Draw Me After (FSG, November 2022) and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG, 2017)—as well as many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern. Cole has created a body of work that defies traditional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. Among his many honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Jewish National Book Award, the PEN Prize in Translation, and, in 2007, a MacArthur Fellowship.