Nathaniel Deutsch, Swarthmore College

Valery Dymshits,who holds two advanced degrees in chemistry, has been studying Jewish ethnography, history, folklore, and folk art since 1988. His main interests are Jewish folk culture and folk literature. He joined or led 13 Jewish ethnographic expeditions between 1989 and 1997, and since 2000 he has supervised "Petersburg Judaica," a new scientific center that is organizing a Jewish museum in St. Petersburg. Given all that, he writes, "How could I not be fascinated by Ansky?"

Jonathan Frankel is professor of modern Russian and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-editor of Contemporary Jewry, an annual published by Oxford University Press. His interest in Ansky is related to his research on the role of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia in the emergence of modern Jewish politics and on the ways in which Russian populism influenced that intelligentsia.

Carmit Gai-Shaltiel, who was born on the kibbutz Yad Hanna, has been working for almost 30 years at Kol Israel, Israel's public radio, especially in current affairs. She has translated several books and written three, including a biography of Hanna Rovina, the star of the Habima production of The Dybbuk.

Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Associate Professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, is the author of Crossing the Jabbok : illness and death in Ashkenazi Judaism in sixteenth- through ninteenth-century Prague, and The Clepsydra: An Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism (in French). She writes of her "continuum of fascination for the persona of Ansky and his work": "My first encounter with Ansky was with The Dybbuk, performed in childhood, the second was with his 'Der toyt in dem yidishn folksgloybn,' and the third will be the last part of my work on 'Jewish Uses of Time.'"

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of four novels, including The Mind-Body Problem. Her work has won numerous prizes, among them two Whiting Awards. In 1996 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Her 1995 novel, Mazel, was based in part on the history of the productions of The Dybbuk in Warsaw.

Itzik Gottesman is the Associate Editor at the weekly Yiddish-language Forward. He has taught Yiddish language and culture at the University of Texas at Austin. His interest is in Yiddish folklore and his book, Defining the Yiddish Nation: the Jewish Folklorists of Poland, is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Brian Horowitz, Associate Professor of Russian and Judaica at the University of Nebraska, is the recipient this year of an Alexander Von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany and a Fullbright award to do research in Kiev, Ukraine. He writes, "I got interested in Ansky because his synthetic approach to resolving the paradoxes of 'Old and New Judaism' seemed more promising than Dubnov's, since Ansky placed his emphasis on individual consciousness rather than collective politics."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Vladislav Ivanov wrote extensively on modern Soviet theater, especially the generation of directors who used theater as a means of staging a protest. In the 1990s, he became interested in Russian theatrical history of the first few decades of the 20^th century. His book, The Russian Seasons of the Habima Theater (in Russian), was published in 1999. His interest in Ansky focuses on the Habima performances of The Dybbuk.

Mikhail Krutikov, who once worked for the Soviet Yiddish magazine Sovetish Heymland, has a Ph.D. in Jewish literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary and now teaches Yiddish literature at the University of London. Krutikov writes, "Ansky's complex personality represents for me many of the paradoxes of modern Russian-Jewish identity: his life-long effort to reconcile the old and the new; his search for ethnic roots and his commitment to universal ideals of justice; his political engagement and his mystical detachment from reality."

Jack Kugelmass, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the New School for Social Research, has taught at the Max Weinreich Center, YIVO, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison; he currently holds a chair in Holocaust and Modern Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. His books include The Miracle of Intervale Avenue, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, Going Home, and Masked Culture, and he is now working on a book or essays on how Jews remember Poland. He is interested in Ansky's status as "a sort of symbolic grandfather figure for Jewish anthropology."

Cecile Kuznitz, who holds a Ph.D. in modern Jewish history from Stanford, is Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish History at Georgetown University. She wrote her dissertation on the YIVO institute for Jewish Research and has published on Yiddish culture and the urban landscape in interwar Vilna. Her interest in Ansky emerges from her work on Vilna and on Yiddish folklore studies.

Benjamin Lukin emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel, where he works in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People and participates in research conducted by the Center for Jewish Art at Hebrew University. He is a co-author and the managing editor of the Historical Guide series, One Hundred Shtetls in Ukraine. He is interested in Ansky as the first Jewish cultural anthropologist in Russia.

Joachim Neugroschel has translated some 180 books from French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish, and won numerous awards for his work. Tony Kushner adapted his version of The Dybbuk from Neugroschel's translation. Neugroschel has published two Ansky-centered volumes of translations recently, including The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader (Syracuse, 2000), and his translation of The Destruction of Galicia is due out in 2001.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern has a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Moscow University. Currently he teaches at Tufts University and Hebrew College in Boston. His interest in Ansky is twofold: he is preparing for publication Hebrew manuscripts that Ansky collected during his 1911-1914 expedition, and he is investigating the personal, cultural, literary, and linguistic contexts in which Ansky wrote The Dybbuk.

Ruth Rischin is an independent scholar and an expert on Semyon Yushkevich. She is the author of the forthcoming articles, "Is there a Christian in the Text? Vladimir Soloviev and Naum Naumov" (Symposion) and "In the Shades of Spain: Gorky's Last Legacy to Hebrew Literature" (Kritika). She will speak about connections between plays by Yushkevich and Ansky.

David Roskies, a professor of Jewish literature, is a cultural historian of East European Jewry, chiefly concerned with its modes of self-expression, both highbrow and lowbrow, at home and abroad, in good times and bad. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, he began studying the modern Jewish return to folklore and fantasy. The fruits of his labor are The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky and A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling.

Gabriella Safran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford and the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (2000). Her fascination with Ansky reflects her developing interests in folklore, literacy, Russian-Yiddish literary relations, and the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire.

Irina Serheyeva is the head of the Judaica Division at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev. She has published on the extensive Ansky collections at the Library.

Michael Steinlauf, a historian of East European Jewish culture and Polish-Jewish relations and the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, is currently editing an issue of the annual Polin devoted to Jewish popular culture in Poland and working on a book about Jewish theater in Poland. He writes, "Ansky stood at the intersection of the most exciting developments in Jewish national consciousness and art of his time; The Dybbuk was a turning point in the history of Jewish theater."

Seth Wolitz has held the Gale Chair of Jewish Studies for 20 years and is Professsor of Slavic, French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He publishes on comparative literature and Yiddish literature. His interest in Ansky derives from his interests in Jewish theater, its ties to Western theatrical practices, and the role of Jewish theater as esthetic expression and as a space of protest and education. He writes, "Ansky as artist and ideologue finds expression in his theater."

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Stanford University. His most recent book is Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. His research interests include the history of East European Jewry, contemporary Jewish culture, Jewish nationalism, and identity -- all areas for which Ansky remains, it seems to him, a prescient, perceptive guide.