To Make the Hands Impure Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy

Adam Zachary Newton is currently University Professor at Yeshiva University where he holds the Ronald P. Stanton Chair in Literature and the Humanities. He is the author of four additional books: Narrative Ethics (Harvard UP, 1995), recipient of the press's Thomas J. Wilson Prize for "best first book in the calendar year" and the International Society for the Study of Narrative's Perkins Prize for "the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative"; Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in 20th-Century America (Cambridge UP, 1988); The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Israel Among the Nations (SUNY Press, 2001); The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He did graduate work in literature and philosophy at Harvard University and taught for 14 years at the University of Texas at Austin where he was the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in English, member of the Committee on Comparative Literature, and acting director for the Program in Jewish Studies Program. His multiple areas of scholarly expertise fall under the general rubric of "the ethics of reading"; they include the novel in various national literatures and its theory; narrative poetics; hermeneutics; history of criticism; modern Jewish thought; philosophy; Jewish and minority literatures.