13 - Hebrew in America

Summary

The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe carried some Hebraists to the United States, adding New York City to the major centers of Hebrew literary production. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers in America included Naphtali Hertz Imber, whose poem Hatikvah later became the Israeli national anthem. In the introduction to his 1938 anthology of Hebrew poetry in America, Menachem Ribalow described the rise of modernism as a storm swept through all literatures and rocked the foundations of poetry. In the early 1920s, Hillel Bavli published a series of five articles on contemporary American poetry that shows how difficult it was for the Hebrew poet in America to see Anglo-American modernism as a resource and a model. To the extent that a new flowering of Hebrew culture in America such as the Hebraists accomplished is at all conceivable, it would be an extension of Israeli literature and not a center in its own right.