Baruch Kurzweil

Kurzweil was born in Brtnice, Moravia (now Czech Republic) in 1907, to an Orthodox Jewish family.^[2][3] He studied at Solomon Breuer's yeshiva in Frankfurt and the University of Frankfurt.^[4] Kurzweil emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1939.^[3] Kurzweil taught at a high school in Haifa, where he mentored the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch and psychologist Amos Tversky.^[5][6] He founded and headed Bar Ilan University's Department of Hebrew Literature until his death. He wrote a column for Haaretz newspaper.^[3][7]

Kurzweil committed suicide in 1972.^[3]

Kurzweil saw secular modernity (including secular Zionism) as representing a tragic, fundamental break from the premodern world.^[3] Where before the belief in God provided a fundamental absolute of human existence, in the modern world this pillar of human life has disappeared, leaving a "void" that moderns futilely attempt to fill by exalting the individual ego.^[3] According to Kurzweil, this discontinuity is reflected in modern Hebrew literature, which lacks the religious foundation of traditional Jewish literature: “The secularism of modern Hebrew literature is a given in that it is for the most part the outgrowth of a spiritual world divested of the primordial certainty in a sacral foundation that envelops all the events of life and measures their value.”^{[3][8][9][10]}

Kurzweil saw a writer's response to the "void" of modern existence as their most fundamental characteristic.^[3] He believed S.Y. Agnon and Uri Zvi Grinberg were the greatest modern Hebrew writers.^[3][11] A confrontational polemicist, Kurzweil famously wrote against Ahad Haam and Gershom Scholem, who he saw as attempting to establish secularism as the foundation of Jewish life.^[3]

• In 1962, Kurzweil was awarded the Bialik Prize for literature.^[12]

• Hebrew literature
• List of Bialik Prize recipients