Mark H. Gelber

Mark. H. Gelber (born 1951, New York City) is an American-Israeli scholar of comparative literature and German-Jewish literature and culture. He received his B.A. magna cum laude and with high honors in Letters and German (Phi Beta Kappa, Wesleyan University, 1972). He also studied at the University of Bonn, the University of Grenoble, and Tel Aviv University. He was accepted for graduate studies as a Lewis Farmington Fellow at Yale University and he received his M.A. (1974), M.Phil. with high honors (1979), and Ph.D. from Yale University (1980). In the same year he accepted an appointment as post-doctoral lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Except for guest professorships and periods of time spent as a research fellow abroad, he has been affiliated with BGU since that time. His research topics include: German-Jewish literature and culture, comparative literature, exile theory and the literature of exile, cultural Zionism, early Zionist literature and journalism, literary anti-Semitism, autobiography and biography, and the practice of literary reception. He lectures frequently at international meetings and conferences in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Gelber won Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowships in 1991-92 and in 2004 (Univ. Tübingen, Freie Universität Berlin), in addition to several DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) research stipends. He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1985–87), a David Herzog visiting professor at the University of Graz (1996, 2008), guest professor at the University of Maribor (2007), Blaustein visiting professor at Yale University in Judaic Studies (2006), honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland (2011), guest professor of German literature at the Universiteit Antwerpen (2013), DAAD-Gastprofessor at the RWTH Aachen (2013), Taub Center guest professor at New York University (2013), and guest professor at Renmin University, Beijing (2015). He was invited to be a member of the International Advisory Board of the Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute (Lonbdon) and appointed to the wissenschaftliche Beirat of "Literaturstrasse," the Chinese-German Yearbook for Language, Literature and Cultural Studies.

Since 2008 Gelber directs the Research Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben-Gurion University. He has been a member of the executive board of the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies since its founding at BGU. He has served twice as Chair of the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and was the Director of the Overseas Student Programs and the Center for International Student Programs at BGU (1996–2004). He established and directed the Internationale Sommeruniversität für Hebräisch, Jüdische Studien und Israelwissenschaften in Beer Sheva (1998–2004, 2009), which has hosted hundreds of German-speaking students from a dozen countries since its inception. In November 2008, he was appointed Dean of International Academic Affairs at Ben-Gurion University. In 2009 he was elected to the executive board of the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem.

In 2001 Gelber was elected to life membership in the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt). From 2007-2014 he served as the Israeli academic representative on the Fellowship Committee for the Minerva Foundation of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (München) with primary responsibility for the faculties of the humanities, social sciences and law. He regularly reviews research projects for the German-Israel Fund (GIF). He was appointed twice by Israeli Ministers of Education to be a judge for the Israel Prize in World Literature (2000) and in Hebrew and Jewish Literatures (1996).

Gelber also sits on the International Scientific Board of the Österreichische Exilbibliothek (Vienna) and the executive board of the Institute for Jewish Studies in Antwerp. He is a member of the editorial board of the prestigious conditio judaica book series on German-Jewish Literature and Culture, first published at Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen) and now published by Verlag Walter de Gruyter (Berlin) and is a member of the editorial board of the series "Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts," also published by de Gruyter. He is on the international editorial board of "transversal," published by the Center of Jewish Studies, University of Graz, as well as the international editorial board of “Chilufim,” published by the Center for Jewish Cultural History at the University of Salzburg. He was elected to serve on the academic committee of the Internationale Stefan Zweig Gesellschaft (Salzburg) and to the Executive Board of the Association for European Jewish Literature Studies (EJLS).

Gelber has published more than 100 scholarly works (articles and monographs) and is known for his wide range of subjects spanning the fields of literature, history, religion, cultural studies, sociology and philosophy, including the following: Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti, Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl, Nathan Birnbaum, Else Lasker-Schüler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Max Nordau, E.M. Lilien, Thomas Mann, Gustav Freytag, Georg Hermann, Manfred Sturmann, Julius Bab, Nelly Sachs, Glückel von Hameln, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Emil Franzos, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Erica Jong, Elie Wiesel, Jakov Lind, Ruth Klüger and others. M.A. and doctoral students have written theses under his guidance on a wide range of topics, including: “The Tarot in Eliot, Yeats, and Kafka,” “Kafka’s Substitute Mothers,” “Franz Kafka’s Mystical Modalities,” “Martin Buber’s Theory of Art Education,” “Mapping Zionism: East and West in Early Zionist Thought,” and “Jacques Derrida’s Double Torah.” Others are currently working on topics such as “Academic Autobiography: Peter Gay and Sara Kofman,” “Authenticity in Early German Zionist Writings,” “Edgar Allan Poe and the Hebrew Bible," and "The Gray Zone in Primo Levi's Ethical Thought." He has functioned as host and mentor to numerous post-doctoral fellows, sponsored by the Kreitman School at BGU, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Minerva Foundation. His post-doctoral researchers have included: Eitan Bar-Yosef, Amos Morris-Reich, Na’ama Rokem, Bettina von Jagow, Stefan Vogt and others.

At the first international conference concerning literary anti-Semitism (Bielefeld, 2007) Gelber was called a pioneer in the field. It was the topic of his doctoral dissertation, “Aspects of Literary Anti-Semitism: Dickens and Freytag” (Yale: 1980). His foundational scholarly article, "What is Literary Anti-Semitism?" (1985) appeared in Jewish Social Studies (then published by Columbia University in New York). According to Gelber: "…any useful definition of literary anti-Semitism must proceed from literature itself, that is, from texts... literary anti-Semitism may be defined as the potential or capacity of a text to encourage or positively evaluate anti-Semitic attitudes or behaviors, in accordance, generally, with the delineation of such attitudes and behaviors by social scientists and historians. Just as social scientists are careful to locate and identify anti-Semitism according to indices of attitudes and behaviors, literary scholars must attempt to understand precisely how anti-Semitic attitudes manifest themselves in literature and how 'anti-Semitically charged elements' function and interact in texts." His other articles on literary (and filmic) anti-Semitism have focused on Charles Dickens, Gustav Freytag, Julius Langbehn, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man, and Mel Gibson. In 2012 he organized a study day in Israel on the possible literary anti-Semitism and public controversy concerning Günter Grass's "Was gesagt werden muss."

Gelber’s book on Cultural Zionism and German Literature and Culture, entitled Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (2000) illuminated the diverse and complicated reciprocal relationships between Jewish national expression and German literature and culture at the end of the 19th century. Numerous scholarly reviewers, including Ritchie Robertson (Oxford), Gerhard Kurz (Giessen) and Armin A. Wallas (Klagenfurt) were unanimous in their high praise this study. Key figures such as Martin Buber, Nathan Birnbaum, E.M. Lilien, Lesser Ury, Berthold Feiwel, Adolph Donath, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Karl Wolfskehl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen and many others appear in this particular cultural and literary space.

Gelber is recognized internationally as an expert on the writings and career of Franz Kafka, especially regarding his complex relationship to Zionism. He organized an international conference on this topic in 1999, entitled: “’Ich bin Ende oder Anfang’: Kafka, Zionism and Beyond.” He contributed an essay on Zionist interpretations of Kafka to the Kafka Handbuch (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). Gelber has served as an expert consultant to the National Library of Israel in the protracted legal case concerning the will and literary estate of Max Brod, which includes numerous Kafka manuscripts. He has been invited by various institutes and universities, such as Stanford University, New York University, Wesleyan University, the University of California, Davis, the University of Antwerp, RWTH Aachen, the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, New School for Social Research in New York, and others, to deliver lectures on Kafka and his work, his relationship to Zionism, and the trial in Israel. In 2015, Gelber co-organized an international conference at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva entitled "Kafka after Kafka."

Gelber is known for his numerous publications on the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, which have inaugurated a new way of reading Zweig, particularly within various Jewish and Zionist contexts. He has been called "one of the world's most eminent authorities on the works of the early 20th century Jewish-Austrian author Stefan Zweig" and the "Israeli Zweig expert" and he was invited by the city of Salzburg to organize the first major international Stefan Zweig Congress (1992). He subsequently organized two more international Zweig conferences (Jerusalem-Beer Sheva, Berlin). In 2011, he gave the first biannual Stefan Zweig lecture at the State University of New York at Fredonia, the location of a major Stefan Zweig archive. In 2012, he delivered opening plenary lectures at two major international Zweig conferences held at the University of London and at Renmin University in Beijing. Stefan Zweig, Judentum und Zionismus was published by Studien Verlag (Innsbruck) in 2014. Gelber also co-edited a volume of essays, Stefan Zweig and World Literature: 21st Century Perspectives (Camden House: 2014). Gelber is also co-editor (with Zhang Yi, Renmin University in Beijing) of the essay collection entitled: Aktualität und Beliebtheit – Neue Forschung und Rezeption von Stefan Zweig im internationalen Blickwinkel (2015). The notion of a renaissance in Zweig Studies is now being bruited and Gelber has made a significant contribution to it.

Gelber was initiator and co-organizer of an international conference, "Stefan Zweig - ein juedischer Schrifsteller aus Europa" which took place at the Stefan Zweig Centre in Salzburg in 2015. The proceedings of the conference, entitled "Stefan Zweig - Juedische Relationen" and co-edited by Gelber, are being published in 2016 as volume 7 in the Stefan Zweig Centre's book series. In November 2016 Gelber lectured in Hebrew at an event in memory of Zweig, organized by the National Library of Israel entitled: Stefan Zweig, the Future, and the Literary World between the World Wars.

Following in the footseteps of one of his mentors, Professor Solomon Liptzin, for whom he has edited Identity and Ethos: A Festschrift for Sol Liptzin on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday, Gelber has contributed numerous articles in the field of Yiddish-German literary relations. In this area he has published on Heinrich Heine and Yiddish; Stefan Zweig, Sholem Asch and Yiddish; Stefan Zweig, Yiddish and East European Literature and Culture; on Yiddish lexical items (and multilingualism) in the work of Stefan Zweig, Fanya Heller, and Ruth Klüger. An essay on Rose Ausländer in Jewish and German and Jewish Cultural Spaces of Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bukowina), based on a lecture delivered in Wellington, New Zealand, will be published in 2014. In his lecture at the International Kafka Conference held in Prague in 2016, "Kafka and Interculturality," Gelber spoke about the literary relationship between one of the major figures in the modern Yiddish revival, Nathan Birnbaum, and Franz Kafka. In the framework of an intercultural investigation, it can be shown that there is much more to this relationship than merely a Yiddish-German (language) connection.

Gelber has published extensively in the field of German-Jewish Literature and Culture, which he views as a “discipline in its own right.” In an essay based on a conference lecture he gave in Tel Aviv in 2004, and entitled “German-Jewish Literature and Culture and the Field of German-Jewish Studies,” he wrote: “This discipline may be discerned between the boundaries of Germanistik on one side and Jewish Studies on the other, although such fields as Exile Studies (and Diaspora Studies) and Holocaust Studies (and Memory Studies), which also emerged from and appear to be tangential to German and Jewish Studies respectively, also border on and derive synergistic intellectual energy from German-Jewish Studies.” Gelber organized a major international conference on “Thirty Years of German-Jewish Literary Cultural Studies” in Beer Sheva and Jerusalem in 2010. The proceedings are to be published by Aisthesis Verlag in Bielefeld. He is the author of numerous academic encyclopedia articles and essays about German-Jewish literature and culture, and German-Jewish writers, including: Max Brod, Martin Buber, Lion Feuchtwanger, Berthold Feiwel, Iwan Goll, Sammy Gronnemann, Georg Hirschfeld, Leo Kompert, Theodor Lessing, Jakov Lind, Samuel Lublinski, Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, Chaim Noll, Karl Wolfskehl, Arnold Zweig, and others.