David G. Roskies

David G. Roskies, a native of Montreal, Canada, is the Saul and Evelyn Henkind Emeritus Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and emeritus professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His major works are 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); Yiddishlands: A Memoir (2008, 2023); and Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (2012), coauthored with Naomi Diamant. A thirtieth-anniversary edition of his The Shtetl Book: An Introduction to East European Jewish Life and Lore was published in 2005. In 1981, Roskies and Alan Mintz cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and Roskies served for eighteen years as editor-in-chief of the New Yiddish Library. All Things Yiddish is an open-access portal to his personal and professional archive. Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He is the coeditor, with Samuel Kassow, of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 9: Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973.