In Winter 2014, Hebrew instructor Hadar Khazzam-Horovitz interviewed visiting scholar Ilan Stavans (Amherst College) about the beauty of the Hebrew language, its history, and its unlikely revival as in modern times.

Ilan Stavans on the beauty of the Hebrew language:

 
On Hebrew’s “astonishing revival” as a spoken language:

 

View the full conversation:

 
Professor Ilan Stavans visited the University of Washington in Winter 2014 as a visiting lecturer with the support of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Temple Beth Am.

An essayist, cultural critic, and translator, Professor Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five College-Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. A native of Mexico, he received his Doctorate in Latin American Literature from Columbia University.

His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), Love and Language (2007), and Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (2010).  His most recent titles are, as translator, Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames (Texas, 2012) and Pablo Neruda’s All the Odes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), and, as author, Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots (Rutgers, 2012), the graphic novel El Iluminado (Basic, 2012, with Steve Sheinkin), and the children’s book Golemito (New South).