David G. Roskies

Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, New York ~Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture; Professor of Jewish Literature. In 1981, co-founded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, which he co-edited for twenty-five years. Work has focused on responses to catastrophic violence, including the Holocaust, in Jewish history. Author of Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (1984), which received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize; The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (1989); and Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (2012). Book Night Words: A Midrash on the Holocaust (1971), one of the earliest liturgies on the subject, is now in its fifth edition. Explored Yiddish literary traditions in A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (1995). Focused on the creation of Jewish cultural memory in essay collection The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (1999). Authored Yiddishlands: A Memoir (2008), which tells the story of modern Yiddish culture through the lens of family history and Yiddish song. Served as Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. Visiting Professor of Jewish Literatures, Ben-Gurion University in Israel. Since 1997, has served as Editor-in-Chief of the New Yiddish Library.~