The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artifacts, texts, and paintings, selected by more than 120 internationally recognized scholars.
Professor Alan Mintz died suddenly on May 20th, a terrible loss for his family, his students at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his colleagues, both at JTS and around the Jewish Studies world. Among the many tributes and eulogies published over the weekend were two, one written by David Roskies, the co-editor of Volume 9 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, and another written by Jonathan Sarna, a member of the Posen Library's Advisory Board.
Professor’s Mintz’s passion for modern Hebrew literature was legendary. He was a founding editor (with Roskies) of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and, more than a decade earlier, a founder of Response Magazine, a Jewish student literary and political journal which published a mix of scholarship, often related to such activist causes as feminism, along with poetry, proposals for innovations in Jewish religion and culture, and political essays.
As the author of Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in America and the editor of Reading Hebrew Literature, among other many books, he sought to understand modern Jewish life in Israel and America, through the prism of Hebrew literature.
A brief sketch of Professor Mintz’s c.v.—he held an esteemed position as the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at JTS—barely does justice to his olympian contribution to Jewish scholarship and, indeed, to Jewish life over the past five decades. Professor Mintz was involved with multiple volumes of the Posen Library anthology, and his colleagues here share the shock and bereftness of so many others who learned of his death over the weekend.
