“Tovlkunst vi a shlisl tsu der yiddisher khurbn-literatur 1943-1979”

A native of Montreal, Canada, Prof David G. Roskies is Sol & Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary and has also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Russian State University for the Humanities. A major focus of his work is the Holocaust, which he has approached in three different ways. A pioneer in the field of Holocaust commemoration, he published Night Words: A Midrash on the Holocaust in 1971, which was subsequently translated into Hebrew, German, and Turkish. In 1984, his major scholarly work, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Jewish Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa. This was followed in 2012 by Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide, co-authored with Naomi Diamant. A third approach has been anthological. The Literature of Destruction: Responses to Catastrophe (1989) is a companion volume to Against the Apocalypse. In 2019, he published Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History, and last year, his anthology Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939-1973, co-authored with Samuel D. Kassow, appeared as vol. 9 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Professor Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.