Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Biblical poetry such as the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah may be considered early examples of Jewish epic poetry, though very short by normal epic standards. Both songs are compared by scholars to Canaanite and Assyrian epic poetry.
The tradition of humor in Judaism dates back to the compilation of the Torah and the Midrash in the ancient Middle East, but the most famous form of Jewish humor consists of the more recent stream of verbal and frequently anecdotal humor of Ashkenazi Jews which took root in the United States during the last one hundred years, it even took root in secular Jewish culture. In its early form, European Jewish humor was developed in the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, with theological satire becoming a traditional way to clandestinely express opposition to Christianization.
Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture." In 2006 he published a revised edition with new introduction and afterword, reflecting on the endurance of reading.
Isaac Leib Peretz, also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was a Polish Jewish writer and playwright writing in Yiddish. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter.... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
David G. Roskies is an internationally recognized Canadian literary scholar, cultural historian and author in the field of Yiddish literature and the culture of Eastern European Jewry. He is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
Moyshe Kulbak was a Belarusian Jewish writer who wrote in Yiddish.
The Poets' Prize is awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year. The $3000 annual prize is donated by a committee of about 20 American poets, who each nominate two books and who also serve as judges. The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City hosts the annual awards reception in May, which includes readings by the winner and finalists. The founders of the prize were Robert McDowell, Frederick Morgan, and Louis Simpson. The current co-chairs of the prize committee are Robert Archambeau and Marc Vincenz.
Eliot Weinberger is an American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. He is primarily known for his essays and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages.
Ander Monson is an American novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer.
Ephraim Deinard (1846–1930) was a Hebrew bookman. He was a bookseller, bibliographer, publicist, polemicist, historian, memoirist, author, editor, and publisher. He produced some 70 volumes whose subjects range from Jewish history and antiquities, to treatises against Hasidism, Christianity, and Communism, parodies, medieval and modern Hebrew literature, Jewish religion, and especially booklore.
Howard Schwartz is an American folklorist, author, poet, and editor of dozens of books. He has won the international Koret Jewish Book Award, for the book Before You Were Born, and won a 2005 National Jewish Book Award for Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. He has been featured in the Jewish Children's Book Project, local media in his hometown of Saint Louis, The Jerusalem Post, and The Canadian Jewish News, as well as in many other publications.
The Baron Hirsch Synagogue, is a Modern Orthodox Jewish congregation and synagogue located at 400 South Yates Road, Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States. Founded in c. 1862 – c. 1864, the congregation underwent tremendous growth in the first half of the 20th century, emerging, in the 1950s, as the largest Orthodox congregation in North America, a position it still holds.
The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were a Canadian program of literary awards, managed, produced and presented annually by the Koffler Centre of the Arts to works judged to be the year's best works of literature by Jewish Canadian writers or on Jewish cultural and historical topics.
Pierre Anctil is a Canadian historian. He is specialist of the Jewish community of Montreal, of Yiddish literature and of the poetic work of Jacob-Isaac Segal. He also published on the history of immigration to Canada. He translated a dozen Yiddish books into French.
