Around the Point

Hillel Weiss has been Professor Emeritus at Bar-Ilan University from October 2013. He has published and edited numerous books and articles on Agnon's works, as well as on other authors of Hebrew and Israeli literature, and is currently engaged in preparing the academic edition of Agnon's works. He has developed theories and applications for storage, mapping, indexing, and analyzing texts by computer. Hillel Weiss has also served as Head of the Rena Costa Multidisciplinary Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar-Ilan University since 2011.Roman Katsman teaches modern Hebrew literature, poetics and theory at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University. He is an author of books and articles on Hebrew and Slavic literatures, mythopoesis and chaos theory, literary anthropology, body language in literature, rhetoric, alternative history, and Jewish-Russian literature and thought. His recently published works include 'A Small Prophecy': Sincerity and Rhetoric in Ir u-meloa by S.Y. Agnon (in Hebrew, 2013) and Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature (2013).Ber Kotlerman is Associate Professor at the Bar Ilan University Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies, where he has been Academic Director since 2011, and a Foreign Research Fellow in the Asia Japan Center at Kokushikan University in Tokyo. His professional fields of interest include Yiddish language and culture, Old Yiddish literature, history of Eastern European Jewry, and Jewish theater and cinema. His publications include In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of 'Soviet Jewish Statehood' (Bloomington, 2009), Bauhaus in Birobidzhan (Tel Aviv, 2008), and the forthcoming Sholem Aleichem behind the Scenes of Early Jewish Cinema (Bloomington, 2014).