Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018. Robert Alter earned his bachelor's degree in English (Columbia University, 1957), and his master's degree (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University in comparative literature. He started his career as a writer at Commentary, where he was for many years a contributing editor. He has written twenty-three books, and is noted most recently for his translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. He lectures on topics varying from Biblical episodes to Kafka's modernism and Hebrew literature. One of Alter's important contributions is the introduction of the type scene into contemporary scholarly Hebrew Bible studies.