SOURCE: Riggan, William. Introduction: “Hebrew Literature in the 1990s,” World Literature Today 72, no. 3 (1998): 479-84.

In the following excerpt from an essay on contemporary Hebrew literature, Riggan calls Agnon the best of the “conservatives” who appreciated the nuances of the Hebrew language tradition.

To read the creative and critical texts gathered here in this special issue of World Literature Today commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel is to witness, by and large, precisely such a turn from the collective to the personal, from state-building to the construction and protection of one's own private, personal space, from questions writ large about the history and nature of Jewry to concern with one's individual love life or education or domestic dilemmas or damaged psyche and soul. …

The fundamental importance of Hebrew as a sociocultural medium is self-evident. First, it is the bond of the individual with...