Resurrecting Hebrew (Jewish Encounters Series) - Hardcover

"Resurrecting Hebrew is exciting and penetrating. This story will be read with deep interest by all those who are fascinated by the renaissance of an ancient language."
--Elie Wiesel

"Ilan Stavan's personal search to discover his relationship with Hebrew leads him to explore the unlikely quest of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda to revive the language of the Bible, a language not spoken outside of the synagogue for two thousand years, as a spoken language. This quixotic, Borgesian undertaking, as unlikely as reviving Latin as the language of everyday Italians, somehow miraculously succeeded. Resurrecting Hebrew reveals, in a fascinating and informative way, how this impossibility became a reality. Written with commendable clarity and vitality, it is a brief, unforgettable masterpiece."
--Howard Schwartz, author of Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism

"There are fewer than eight thousand distinct words in the Hebrew Bible, yet a lone zealot and ragged refugees from every corner of the globe transformed the ancient Jewish tongue into the spoken language of millions. It is a story too fantastic for fiction, and Ilan Stavans tells it with erudition, charm, and a barely contained sense of astonishment."
--Aaron Lansky, president, National Yiddish Book Center and author of Outwitting History

A study of the resurrection of the Hebrew language from extinction focuses on the role of Eliezer ben Yehuda in the nineteenth-century revival of Hebrew, as well as the part language plays in Jewish survival, the origins of Israel, Zionism, the Diaspora, and the idea of a promised land. 20,000 first printing.