Hever: “An Opportunity to do Something Meaningful”

October 30, 2017

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1970s and early ’80s, Hannan Hever pursued his undergraduate and doctoral degrees under the tutelage of some of the greatest minds in Jewish thought. There, he learned that to fully grasp the nuances and complexities of the poetry and prose he was studying, he must first immerse himself in the rich and multifaceted history of the Hebrew and Jewish traditions. A rigorous interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics, philology, and philosophy provided him with the contexts essential to a sophisticated understanding of the cultures’ literary production, reception, and dissemination.

Now Hever, who joined the FAS faculty in 2013, is bringing this wide-angled pedagogical approach to Yale, introducing his students to a breadth of scholarly perspective that, in turn, begets deeper understanding of the texts.

“My vision is to train scholars with a deep understanding of Hebrew and Jewish cultures, and also of the connections between Jewish culture and other cultures,” explained Hever, a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature in the Judaic Studies Program. “To be a real scholar, you have to be familiar with all of these traditions and their roots and surroundings. Unfortunately, this has become quite rare in the United States, in Europe, and even in Israel.”

Hever spent a combined two decades on the faculty of his alma mater, serving as chair of the university’s School of Literatures from 2002 to 2004; was a member of the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University from 1989 to 2000; and has held various visiting appointments, including at Columbia University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He came to New Haven inspired by a promise that, he said, he could see uniquely at Yale: the potential to create a convening point in the United States for world-class scholarship on Hebrew literature and Jewish literatures.

To this end, he has been active in promoting cross-departmental dialogue, collaborating with colleagues not only in comparative literature and Judaic studies, but also in German, French, history, religious studies, and other disciplines that intersect with the study of Jewish literatures. At the same time, he has set his sights on drawing faculty and students from other universities to the Yale campus. Last spring, bolstered by “the wonderful support” he received from both of his home departments, Hever organized a three-day workshop, “Migration and Immigration in Modern Hebrew Literature and Jewish Literatures.” The seminar was an immediate and unqualified success, with 35 graduate students from across the United States and around the world and nine faculty members from Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley, gathering to exchange ideas. (Indeed, the program was so successful that Hever has scheduled a successor workshop, which will likely examine issues of gender, for April 2018.)

In an interview in his second-floor office at 451 College Street, Hever spoke with enthusiasm about the possibilities that coming to Yale has opened up for him. “Yale,” he declared, “gives me an opportunity to make a change—to do something meaningful in my field.”

Already a prolific writer and editor prior to his arrival here, he has, he estimated, doubled his rate of publication in the four years since, thanks to teaching responsibilities that allow more time for research than was the case at his previous institutions. Having moved reverse-chronologically through the literatures of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, he recently turned his focus toward a new project: a study of Hassidic Jewish tales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a genre with intricate and often poorly-understood historical, political, and linguistic (Yiddish, in particular) roots. The resulting book, The Politics of the Hassidic Tale, will be published simultaneously in English and in Hebrew.

His teaching, though, is anything but a secondary focus—indeed, he cites it as integral to, and one of the most rewarding facets of, his work. His courses range from “Jewish Literary Masterpieces” to “The Politics of Modern Hebrew Literature,” covering 300 years of Hebrew literature and the literary and philosophical theories within which his studies are anchored. He is supervising three Ph.D. candidates, training them to be “true scholars” paralleling his own education—that is, well-versed in the long history of their discipline, mastering both texts and contexts. Once a week, he also volunteers his time to teach classical Hebrew literature in its native tongue, helping students to hone a proficiency that can yield profound new insights into the works they are reading. And in his undergraduates—many (but by no means all) of whom are of Jewish heritage—he recognizes not only an intellectual connection, but also an emotional connection that is fed by their studies: “They are very enthusiastic about my all-inclusive perspective—for them, to be in touch with an Israeli scholar who is highly trained in the historical and ideological contexts within which these texts have been and are written, is very intriguing. And I also learn from them—they teach me a lot, coming from their different backgrounds. It’s a great experience to hear their perspectives.”

Beyond the classroom, Hever has found unexpected pleasures in university citizenship—especially in his service as a member of the Divinity School’s standing advisory and appointments committee, which reviews tenure cases in the school. The committee work has brought him into rewarding contact with colleagues across the disciplines while affording him the opportunity to exercise a particular passion of his: voracious reading. “In Israel,” he said, “we don’t have divinity schools as such. I have a long history of writing about and reading Jewish religious texts, but now the opportunity to read texts from other religious traditions is incredibly exciting. I am learning so much from the materials I read in order to prepare for each case.”

By all accounts, visitors to Hever’s home would take little surprise from the fact that he is an avid reader. There are, he estimates, over 10,000 volumes in his personal library. And with the rate at which he is producing his own oeuvre, there is little doubt that the collected works of Hannan Hever constitute a substantial part of other scholars’ libraries the world over.

-Reported and written by Alison Coleman for the FAS Dean’s Office