Sanctuary in the Wilderness

Alan Mintz is Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was a founder and co-editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

"Through the scrupulous investigation of a neglected body of poems, Alan Mintz has succeeded in writing a new chapter in the history of modern Hebrew poetry. Literary criticism in Israel, for both cultural and ideological reasons, has paid scant attention to the Hebrew poetry produced in America in the twentieth century. Mintz's minutely attentive discussions of the poets and their poems broadens our sense of Hebrew poetry and of the variety of American cultural experience."—Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley --- "This fascinating literary study of twelve Hebrew poets who flourished as a 'virtual community' in America about the middle of the 20th century revises and expands our understanding of poetry, modernism, Hebrew, and, not least, America. It invites us to wonder when and under what conditions such an island of Hebrew creativity might surface here again."—Ruth Wisse, Harvard University --- "Mintz's Sanctuary in the Wilderness (2011)—which deals almost exclusively with Hebrew poetry—is unique in identifying the source of the American Hebrew literary tradition in the writers' pure and uncompromising love affair with the Hebrew language. Mintz includes himself in this love affair, and it is that passion that enables him to recover the extraordinary passion of the texts . . . [Mintz is] to be thanked for recovering this world of one of the Jewish mother tongues."—Emily Miller Budick, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States --- "Mintz illuminates the poets' biographies, brief as they are, with the skill of a pointillist. But it is in his analysis of the poems themselves that he is most masterly . . . Mintz means the poem to be understood both for its inwardness and for the air it breathes; his critical vocabulary has the discerning force of insight."—Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic --- "Alan Mintz has written a wonderful work of scholarship on a little-known subject: the large amount of serious and no-forgotten Hebrew poetry written in 20th-century America . . . Mintz has performed an enormous service by introducing us to an unusual body of [poetry] that now, because of his fine book, stands a better chance of being remembered."—Hillel Halkin, Jewish Review of Books --- "[Mintz's] work is crucial for those interested in the formation and future of modern American Jewish cultural values. . . . Highly recommended."—S. Ward, CHOICE --- "Alan Mintz's Sanctuary in the Wilderness represents a grand undertaking of the emergence and development of Hebrew poetry in America."—Dalia R. Daniel, World Literature Today