Robert Alter

b. 1935

Robert Alter, born in New York City and brought up in Albany, is a biblical scholar and professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. As a longtime contributing editor at Commentary magazine, he brought Israeli literature and culture to the attention of the American reader. A literary critic and translator, he is the author of numerous monographs and is the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award and the Koret Jewish Book Award.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

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Jewish Dreams and Nightmares

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The case of Kafka, the acculturated Jew, shows how a man may feel his way into a body of collective history through his very consciousness of being outside it: Kafka brooded over the experience of the…

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Introduction to the Old Testament

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Any literary account of the Hebrew Bible must recognize [its] quality of extreme heterogeneity. […] From one point of view, it is not even a unified collection but rather a loose anthology that…