In Praise of the Hebraists in America

The American Hebrew poet Shimon Ginsburg was born in Ukraine and received a traditional heder education and then a secular education. He first attracted attention as a promising young Hebrew poet in Odessa, then the capital of Hebrew letters, where he lived from 1909 to 1912. Leaving for New York in 1912, he studied at Columbia University and the University of Saskatchewan before completing a doctorate at Dropsie College. He worked in Hebrew education and took part in American Hebraist projects. He immigrated to Palestine in 1933, finding work as an editor. He returned to the United States in the late 1930s to raise funds for literary institutions in the Land of Israel. His poetry was unsparing in its portrayal of the coarseness and ignorance of immigrant Jewish life in the United States.