David G. Roskies
Sol & Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture, Jewish Theological Seminary

A native of Montreal, Canada, David G. Roskies is a cultural historian who has published extensively on modern Yiddish storytelling, Jewish responses to catastrophe, Holocaust literature, and memory. His Yiddishlands: A Memoir (2008) was translated into Hebrew and Russian.

Roskies teaches Yiddish and modern Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1981 (with the late Alan Mintz), he cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for eighteen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Selected Publications

Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (1984), which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa; a companion volume, The Literature of Destruction (1989)

A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (1995)

The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (1999)

Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (2012), co-authored with Naomi Diamant

(יהודיבור: מסות על תרבות יידיש (2018