Remembering Alan

I first met Alan when I was a graduate student presenting a paper on the painter Reuven Rubin at the annual conference of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew in Orlando. Somehow I ended up between sessions sitting at a table with him, and he began to challenge me on the intellectual validity of my dissertation topic. I was, to say the least, taken aback. Here was this perfect stranger, albeit a scholar whose work I had read and admired, telling me over lunch that I should reconsider the entire structure of my doctoral work. I realize now that his response came from a place of curiosity and respect; even then he was speaking to me as a future colleague, a conversation that continued until the Wednesday before his death when, after running into each other in the Jewish Theological Seminary library stacks, we had a brief exchange about a student.

Alan, then, was always the consummate colleague, treating graduate students as seriously as tenured colleagues. He was truly an academic maestro—a conductor of books, people, and ideas. During my first year of teaching at Princeton, he invited me up to Brandeis to participate in a seminar on modern Hebrew literature. Seated around the table with senior scholars from the United States and Israel, I wondered what I, a freshly-minted assistant professor, was doing there. I realize now that even then Alan was inviting me to be a part of the conversation he so valued, one that expressly moved back and forth between Israel and the United States. He was particularly devoted to bridging that gap, encouraging the work of Israeli scholars, and demanding that they read and respect the work of their American peers. That seminar became the book Reading Hebrew Literature, a volume that Alan edited, which is a textbook of sorts: each primary Hebrew source is followed by a set of three distinct critical readings, each by a different scholar. What a great model. Not one, not two, but three … a true conversation.

This kind of conversation was at the heart of Prooftexts, the extraordinary scholarly journal created by Alan and David Roskies that basically invented the field of modern Jewish literary studies. I have in my office a complete printed set of the journal taking up two long shelves near the ceiling. The multicolored spines contain titles whose topics are now indispensible to the field, including Alan's own contribution to the first issue in the winter of 1981, "Agnon in Jaffa: The Myth of the Artist as a Young Man." Given his lifelong engagement with Agnon's work, the choice seems natural; however, in this essay, Alan writes somewhat against the grain of what he calls Agnon's "institutionalization," turning instead to some of the author's earliest stories, whose secularism, according to Alan, sits uneasily within Agnon's oeuvre. I'm not sure when exactly American scholars began making this kind of critical observation about something that would eventually come to be called "Jewish literary history," but Alan's work, and that of his peers in the following issues of the journal, began to create that field, article by article. At the memorial service for Alan held on June 7, 2017 at JTS in New York, I asked any members of the gathered audience who had published work in Prooftexts to raise a hand. Hands shot up across the room, creating a palpable sense of Alan's ongoing reach as a colleague and a friend.

Little did I know when I joined the faculty at JTS that Alan would give me an extraordinary gift. One afternoon, he and David sat down with Jeremy Dauber and myself and handed over the editorial reigns of the journal. This was, I believe, a true act—or, rather, leap—of faith and belief in us; of course, Jeremy and I had no idea what we were getting into. But I like to think that, during our years as editors, we honored that original commitment to what Alan called "editing as intellectual community." That was the title of his "retrospective manifesto," published in the journal in 2004. Remembering his...