Jerusalem: City of the Book

What might it look like to see Jerusalem, with its cross-hatched encounters between people of diverse faiths and cultures, as a city of the book? Is it possible to use libraries and texts to catch the city’s tragedy and its magnificence, to tell the story of a place where some of the world’s most far-reaching ideas were put into words? Benjamin Balint will share his forays into the city’s most inaccessible reaches in the making of his recently published book (co-authored with Merav Mack, with photographs by Frederic Brenner), which Prof. Moshe Halbertal has called “one of the most intimate and beautiful portraits ever written of Jerusalem.”

Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is the author Running Commentary (PublicAffairs) and Kafka’s Last Trial (Norton), which has been translated into ten languages. He is most recently the co-author of Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale). His criticism has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Haaretz, and Die Zeit, and his translations from the Hebrew have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Poetry International.

Naftulin Family Lecture on Studies in Jewish Identity

Sponsored by

The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Cosponsored by

CNES