Podcast: Hillel Halkin and Ruth Wisse on His Life in Hebrew

This Week’s Guests: Hillel Halkin and Ruth Wisse

From 2015 to 2018, the Israeli writer and translator Hillel Halkin published a series of ten essays in Mosaic on the seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries. They dealt with everyone from Ḥayyim Bialik to S.Y. Agnon, Raḥel to Ahad Ha’am. Those essays have now been brought together in Halkin’s newly published book The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion. Writing such a book is an act of cultural preservation, safeguarding the literature, poetry, and essays through which the Jewish people sought to understand themselves as a modern nation in the modern world.

In this podcast, Halkin joins one of his longtime interlocutors, Ruth Wisse, for a wide-ranging discussion about his life, his move to Israel, cultural fidelity, and, of course, his new book. This conversation is a snapshot of a long-running conversation between these two giants of modern Jewish letters. A rough but complete transcript is below.