Ofer Dynes

Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
212-854-3941
od2169@columbia.edu

Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught courses on the literature and history of Eastern European Jewry and served as Head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. His research has been supported by the Posen Society of Fellows, the Center for Jewish History in New York, the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, the Austrian Science Fund, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among other institutions.

Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, with a particular interest in the relationship between fiction and political thought. His first book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature, will be published by Stanford University Press in September 2026. The manuscript received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is the co-editor, with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto), of the Prooftexts special issue The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe. His articles have appeared in Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, AJS Review, and other scholarly journals. He is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New York–based workshop for scholars of Hebrew literature. In 2027, he will be a research fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.