Steady Work: The Unmessianic Nature of Jewish Messianism

Tue, Oct 25, 2011

6:30 PM

Join Leon Wieseltier for the 16th Annual Irving Howe Memorial Lecture. Wieseltier has been the literary editor of The New Republic since 1983, and is the author of Kaddish, among other books, and the editor of The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays of Lionel Trilling. His essays on cultural, political, and religious subjects have been widely published. His translations of Yehuda Amichai and other Hebrew poets have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Irving Howe (1920-1993) graduated from City College 1940. He was a founder of Democratic Socialists of America and was considered one of the country’s most influential literary critics until his death. He founded Dissent magazine, and was a professor at Brandeis and Stanford Universities before he became a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the City University of New York. His books include Politics and the Novel, World of Our Fathers, and Socialism in America. A noted editor of Yiddish literature who discovered the author Isaac Bashevis Singer for an English-speaking audience, he also put together A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. He won the MacArthur Award in 1987. The annual lecture endowed in his honor focus on the subjects closest to Irving Howe’s heart, including politics, Yiddish and Jewish culture, immigrant history and the modern literary imagination.

WATCH A VIDEO OF THE EVENT HERE.

Participants

Tags
Poetry Literature Religion