Benjamin Harshav

Benjamin Harshav was born in 1928 in Vilnius

Benjamin Harshav was born Benjamin Hrushovski in 1928 in Vilnius. His father was a history teacher and his mother was a mathematics teacher and school principal. He attended a secular Yiddish school and a Yiddish gymnasium.

In 1941 his family fled east to the Ural Mountains. He finished high school in 1945 and then studied mathematics and physics in Orenburg. After returning to Poland in 1946 he joined the Dror youth movement and later lived in Munich, where his Yiddish poetry book appeared in 1948.

He reached Israel in 1948 and fought with the Palmach until 1949. From 1949 to 1957 he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from 1957 to 1960 he studied comparative literature at Yale University. He wrote poetry in Yiddish and Hebrew under pen names and co-founded the journal Likrat.

He taught at the Hebrew University and then headed a new literary theory department at Tel Aviv University. He founded the journal Hasifrut in 1968 and the Porter Institute of Poetics and Semiotics in 1975, which he led until 1987. He later taught at Yale University and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He received the EMET Prize in 2005. He died in 2015.