Borns Jewish Studies Program

I am Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature. Currently, my fields of specialization include prose fiction and poetry in which I received a broad education as an undergraduate at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and at the Hertzliah Hebrew Teachers Institute, majoring in Modern Hebrew Literature in both. After receiving my master's in Modern Hebrew Literature, also from Hunter, I studied for my doctorate at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary where I wrote my dissertation on the fiction of S.Y. Agnon.

In the past, I held teaching posts at Hunter College, Union College and at the State University of New York at Albany before coming to teach at Indiana University.

My interest in the fiction of Agnon led me to publish a number of articles and two book-length studies of Agnon. The first one (in Hebrew), Ha-Gibbor be-Eynay Ruho: Torat ha-Sipper be-'oreah nata lalun' le-Shay Agnon [in Hebrew, "The Hero in His Own Eyes: Narrative Techniques in S.Y. Agnon's A Guest for the Night."] (Tel-Aviv: Eked, 1985) was about the importance of narrative in his work and the second, in English, The Centrifugal Novel: S.Y. Agnon's Poetics of Narrative (Madison, N.J.: A.U.P./Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), focused on the author's practice of revision of his fiction over several decades.

More recently, I have published articles on time in the Hebrew novel, Hebrew historical literature and, most recently, the encounter of American Hebrew writers with other minorities--particularly Native- and African-Americans.

My third book, Red, Black, and Jew:  New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature, published by the University of Texas press in 2009, is a study of the representation in (most American) Hebrew literature of Native- and African-Americans as an expression of the assimilation of Jews in the Golden Land.

Although I plan to return some day to Agnon's fiction, I am currently interested in the American experience of Jews and Hebrew writers in particular. Once my study on Hebrew literature's representation of America's minorities is published, I plan to pursue other issues that involved Hebrew literature in America, historical events and literary influences. My encounter with American Hebrew literature has also focused my interests more on Hebrew poetry, and I am interested how the poets in America differed from their fellows in other locations.