"Bialik on the Slaughter: Then and Now," with Peter Cole, Robyn Creswell, Eliyahu Stern, and Jacqueline Vayntrub

A reading and conversation to mark the publication of Peter Cole’s new translation of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poetry, out in October from New York Review Books.

Few poets in the history of Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik. Born in 1873 in a small Ukrainian village, he spent his most productive years in Odessa and in his fifties made his way to British Mandatory Palestine. He died in Vienna in 1934.

Translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, On the Slaughter presents Bialik for the first time in English as a major artist, someone far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his reputation as the national poet of the Jewish people might suggest. This compact collection offers readers a panoramic view of Bialik’s inner and outer landscapes—from his visionary “poems of wrath” that respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and revolutionary unrest to quietly sublime lyrics of longing and withering self-assessment. “No voice comes closer than Bialik’s to capturing the agonizing interplay between Jewish hunger for redemption and the inadequacy of its devotees,” writes Steven Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. “Peter Cole—a major poet himself—has mastered the consummate master of contemporary Hebrew letters, rendering him into English, after so many others have tried, with unrivaled clarity, erudition, and multilingual precision. Here is Bialik taking his rightful place in the larger poetic world.”

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Robyn Creswell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. The author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut and translator of several volumes including Iman Mersal’s The Threshold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which won the National Translation Award in Poetry.   He is currently at work on The Ruins: Arabic Poetry in an Age of Extremes.

Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History and Chair of the Program in Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication, and finalist for the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature) and Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s.  

Jacqueline Vayntrub is an Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. She writes on biblical literature, its interpretation, and the history of biblical scholarship; she is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (Routledge, 2019) and Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026) and is editor of the Library of Hebrew Bible and Old Testament Studies (Bloomsbury), Studies in Cultural Contexts of the Bible (Brill), and the International Critical Commentary (Bloomsbury).