Hebrew writing in America has never captured the sustained interest of scholars of Hebrew or American Jewish life. American Yiddish writing, in contrast, has been the subject of anthologies, articles, and select monographs. In the early twentieth century, Yiddish literature, ranging from popular fiction to modernist poetry, flourished in New York, which was home to many important writers and literary journals. However, with the exception of figures such as Gabriel Preil and S. Halkin, Hebrew writing in America has been relegated to the dustbin of historical obscurity, ignored and largely undocumented. The century-long tradition of Hebrew writing in North America is so marginal that neither scholars of American Jewish life nor scholars of Hebrew literature are likely to be familiar with the major Hebrew authors and works produced on American soil. However, a small sea change is occurring in the study of American Hebrew literature. In recent years there have been three new books on the topic: Michael Weingrad's American Hebrew Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2011), Stephen Katz's Red, Black, and Jew (University of Texas Press, 2009), and Alan Mintz's Sanctuary in the Wilderness (Stanford University Press, 2011).

Of these three recent projects, Mintz's is the most comprehensive and ambitious. Sanctuary in the Wilderness sets out not only to study the history of American Hebrew poetry, but more importantly to produce the necessary resources for future students and scholars of Hebrew literature. Sanctuary in the Wilderness is part anthology, part encyclopedia, part literary history, and part literary analysis. The book focuses solely on Hebrew poetry, offering a comprehensive literary historical overview of major Hebrew poets and their writings. Mintz pairs each biography with illuminating close readings of a select lyric poem. These readings offer a window onto the poetics of American Hebrew, beautifully detailing its neoclassicism and affinity with Anglo-American romanticism. In the last section of the book, Mintz examines the dominant themes that distinguish American Hebrew writing, including Native American and African American folklore, the New England countryside, and the gold rush. Mintz mentions that there are no women included in his study, and explains that only towards the end of his research did he come across a compelling array of women writers, including Claire Levy and Chana Kleinman. Clearly, the male writers dominated this literary scene. The addition of some of the women poets would have added to the volume. Yet by directly raising the issue, Mintz opens up a new avenue for others to consider the role that women writers played in the American Hebrew scene.

Focusing on twelve Hebrew poets, the book traces a distinct American Hebrew literary culture. These writers' educational background, shared literary influences, and cultural milieus separated them from both their Yiddish compatriots and from the central figures of Hebrew writing in pre-state Palestine. Of course some of their biographies overlap with those of Yiddish writers who also participated in an elite Yiddish cultural milieu on American soil. The American Hebrew poets Mintz discusses received traditional Jewish educations in Europe and found work in America as Hebrew tutors and educators. They achieved academic success in the American educational system, where they studied Anglo-American literature—Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and so forth. Many continued their studies at the various universities in New York City, including the City University of New York and Columbia University. By and large they succeeded in making a living as professional educators, working at Hebrew institutions such as the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Herzliah Teachers Institute in New York. Moreover, these Hebraists played a central role in the shaping of Jewish education in America during the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, Hebrew writing in America remained primarily an elite affair, lacking the popular audiences that Yiddish writing attracted. Indeed, many of these Hebrew writers held popular Yiddish culture in contempt. They sought to separate themselves from the immigrant communities from which they themselves emerged.

Despite their prominence in the elite institutions of Jewish higher learning, American Hebrew writers left little impression on the American Jewish literary scene. Moreover, they barely received any notice from the Hebrew community in Palestine/Israel. Mintz explains that Hebrew writers outside of North America, not unlike Yiddish writers, viewed America as the vulgar land of the dollar. Perhaps more significantly, he shows that in the first decades of the twentieth century, when modernism dominated Hebrew literary communities in Palestine and Europe, American Hebraists embraced a pared-down neoclassicism that set them apart and served to marginalize them. Their belated flowering in the 1940s drew little, if any, attention, because by this time the center in Israel had established itself as the home of a new national literature that had little interest in a diasporic periphery. Not surprisingly, the Israeli narrative of Hebrew literary history has shaped the norms by which Hebrew literature has been studied in the United States.

Notably, Mintz, like many other prominent American Hebrew scholars of his generation including Robert Alter, was not formally trained in Hebrew literature. He received his PhD in English at Columbia University and published his first scholarly monograph on the Victorian writer George Eliot. Mintz's background in both Anglo-American and Hebrew literature makes him an ideal figure to revitalize American Hebrew studies. His readings animate the range of American and British, as well as Hebrew, influences on these poets. Moreover, his engagement with American Hebrew writing honors a small but important Jewish American intellectual tradition. Whether this will bring American Hebrew writing to the attention of Israeli scholars, one of Mintz's stated goals, remains to be seen.

Mintz's study also aims to situate American literature in the pantheon of American ethnic writing. Mintz and scholars of American Hebrew continue to be fascinated by Benjamin Silkiner's, Israel Efros's, and Ephraim Lisitsky's epic poems about Native Americans. Mintz devotes an entire chapter to these poems, elucidating their major themes and poetic strategies. Curiously, however, he refers to the subject of these poems as “Indians,” rather than the more acceptable terms American Indian or Native American. This is stranger still, since the he uses “Native American” and not “Indian” as a subject heading in his index. Although Lisitsky, in particular, based his epic poem, Medurot do‘akhot (Dying Campfires), on an array of Native American sources, these poems say more about the aspirations of American Hebrew poets identifying with an American fantasy about the “primitive” American Indians, than they do about Native American life in America. Here, they share much in common with the American Indian vogue among modernist American writers, including Alice Corbin and Carl Sandburg. In their exotification of so-called “primitive” Native American folk culture, these Hebrew writers are actually at their most American. Moreover, this particular group of poems illuminates the complex dialogue between Anglo-American, Hebrew, and Yiddish literary influences that shaped the direction of American Jewish culture in the early part of the twentieth century.

Mintz's volume begins the important work of opening the door to a deeper exploration of the ethnic, linguistic, and national politics that shaped an international and multilingual American Jewish literary scene in the early twentieth century. It is up to a new group of scholars to make the broader literary case for this oeuvre, to examine its prose fiction and its engagement with the American canon, to produce anthologies, and to integrate American Hebrew into the broader fields of Hebrew literature and American Jewish culture. Sanctuary in the Wilderness makes an invaluable contribution to Hebrew literature, introducing a new generation to a rich canon of American Hebrew writing, one that will reshape the narrative of twentieth century Hebrew writing to finally include the small but important American Hebrew center. This volume should be on the shelves of all interested scholars and students of Hebrew literature and American Jewish life.