A Conversation with Professor Lewis Glinert
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
6:30 PM (Doors open at 6:00 PM)
The Tikvah Center, 165 E 56th Street, New York, New York
If you have any questions or concerns,
please contact Malka Groden at mgroden@jewishreviewofbooks.com.
“All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
So mused Mark Twain in the nineteenth century. One such “secret” surely resides in the immortal language that the Jewish people kept alive—and that in many senses kept them alive—throughout their history. With refreshing grace and good humor, Professor Lewis Glinert’s recently released book, The Story of Hebrew, corrects the common misperception that Hebrew was a “dead” language in the centuries between the ancient dispersion and the birth of modern Zionism. The many forms of its survival and renewal throughout the ages of Jewish history reveal the evolving character of the people who held it dear.
Join us for a conversation with Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, as we delve into a tale of the Jewish spirit, told through a tale of the Jewish tongue.
Lewis Glinert is Professor of
Hebrew Studies and Linguistics at Dartmouth College. He previously held appointments at Haifa and Bar-Ilan University, and chaired the London University Centre for Jewish Studies. He has authored and co-authored some 80 papers and seven books, among them The Grammar of Modern Hebrew (Cambridge 1989), the first comprehensive analysis of contemporary Hebrew, (with Jon Schommer) A Screenful of Sugar: Prescription Drug Sites Investigated (Peter Lang 2014), and now The Story of Hebrew (Princeton 2017), enthusiastically reviewed in the Wall St. Journal, Publishers Weekly and Haaretz. His courses include ‘From Genesis to Seinfeld: Jewish Humor and its Roots’, ‘Film, Fiction and the Arab- Israel Conflict’, and ‘Language, conflict and nation-building in Asia and the Middle East’. Invited by the BBC to create a documentary marking the centenary of Spoken Hebrew, Glinert’s Tongue of Tongues (archived at bbc.co.uk) was a BBC 1989 nomination for a SONY award. In 2009 he was voted “Best Professor” by the Dartmouth College Student Assembly.