Ken Frieden

Who is Ken Frieden?

Ken Frieden is the B.G. Professor of Judaic Studies — and a full professor in the Departments of English, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, and Religion — at Syracuse University. He writes about, edits, and promotes Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literature.

He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Yale, studying with Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida. Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller. Based on his dissertation, his first book was Genius and Monologue. The book used key-word analysis of “genius” to show how intellectual history parallels literary history. Frieden’s second book, Freud’s Dream of Interpretation, juxtaposed Freudian interpretation and medieval rabbinic interpretation, arguing that in spite of marked similarities, Freud made efforts to deflect attention from this.

From 1985 to 1986, Frieden was a Lady Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jerusalem. During that time he studied Yiddish and Hebrew literature with Khone Shmeruk and Dan Miron at the Hebrew University. While teaching at Emory University, Frieden focused his research and teaching on twentieth-century Hebrew literature and nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction.