Professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Culture and Comparative Literature
About
Languages: Hebrew, German, Yiddish, English
Affiliations: Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies (appointed); Germanic Languages and Literatures (affiliated)
Teaching interests: An expert in Hebrew, German, English, and Yiddish literature and cinema, I enjoy teaching courses focused on particular media such as film and comics. My courses invite students to consider how films, graphic narratives, and literary texts address the most pressing societal and political questions and issues of the day. We further explore the construction of identities--Jewish, American, German, Israeli--through image, language, and body. On the graduate level, I teach seminars on translation and language theories, which include case studies drawn from students' research interests. In these graduate seminars, we explore the intersection of translation theory with postcolonial studies, secularism studies, and affect theory.
Recent courses:
- Judaic Studies 250 / FTVM "Screening Jewish Cultures" This Race & Ethnicity course explores the diversity of Jewish societies through a range of American, French, German and Israeli films, spanning the history of cinematic production. We discuss how cinema has been used as a tool for antisemitic propaganda, and, later, as a means for post-Holocaust witnessing. The course also introduces students to Israel as an immigrant society and to the cinematic representation of Jewish and Arab minority groups. Throughout the course, we reflect on casting choices, language use and subtitling, cross-dressing, and genre choices, as these affect the cinematic construction of Jewishness in relationship to other social groups.
- Middle East Studies 308 / CompLit 382 "Comics and Conflict: Reframing the Middle East" In recent decades, comics has evolved into a powerful medium for telling stories about conflicts in the Middle East, whether through autobiographical narratives or journalistic reports. The accessibility of comics as a kind of global language enables artists to convey the heavy toll that political strife, revolution, and war takes on soldiers and civilians. This undergraduate course focuses on the development of comics reportage and memoir concerning Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine.
- Judaic Studies 617 / CompLit 780 "Sacred Languages, Secular Translations" This graduate seminar discusses theoretical and philosophical texts concerning modern scriptural translation and, more generally, the status of sacred languages in modern literature. We also explore the place of biblical paradigms in translation studies and draw on examples that reveal the asymmetries entailed in translations among different religious and national cultures.
- CompLit 720 / German 702 "The Task of the Self-Translator" This graduate seminar focuses on the case of multilingual writers and their self-translations to raise questions concerning the temporality, directionality, and “afterlife” of translated works. The figure of the self-translator challenges models of translation and cross-cultural circulation that assume various cultural and historical gaps between the source and its translation. Self-translation calls into question the notions of originality or “the original” and of “fidelity,” and requires us to consider the overlap between translation and rewriting. The course includes case studies drawn from philosophical and literary works written and self-translated in English, French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
Research interests: My research focuses on the development of twentieth-century Hebrew literature in comparative contexts, exploring (self-)translations among Hebrew, German, and Yiddish. I have written about Hebrew authors such Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Leah Goldberg, and Yoel Hoffman, whose published and archival works reveal an ongoing, translational dialogue with European languages and literatures. My broader research interests include Weimar cinema, comics, photography theory, and post-war poetics. My first book, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (NYU Press, 2016) brought these fields together by exploring how golem narratives traveled across a variety of media and languages, transformed in the process to address local and national concerns about modern technologies, mass warfare, and Jewish persecution. My current book project, Translation Beyond Zionism: The Politics of Emotion in German-Hebrew Literary Exchanges, examines translations between Hebrew and German undertaken by early twentieth-century writers and thinkers working across Europe and in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. I focus on cases in which translation interrupts and exceeds the monolingual and territorial Zionist paradigm. My work offers a vocabulary of emotions and attitudes—fondness and love, loss and sorrow, empathy, and disavowal—that brings into relief the political and cultural stakes of translation between Hebrew and German.
Book publications:
Other publications:
- Translating Jewish Cultures, The Frankel Institute for Advanced Studies Annual, co-edited with Adriana X. Jacobs, 2021.
- “Foreign Coins in Hebrew Gold: Yaakov Fichman and the Gendered Economics of Translation,” Dibur Literary Journal 8, Spring 2020.
- “Spoken Hebrew and Hebrew Modernism: A Revised History,” co-authored with Shai Ginsburg, Mikan: A Journal of Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture 20, Spring 2020. 198-227 [Hebrew].
- “Humanizing Shylock: The Jewish ‘Type’ in Weimar Film,” Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema, Berghahn Books, 2020. 25-43.
- “‘One Should Finally Learn How to Read This Breath’: Paul Celan and the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible,” Comparative Literature 71.4, 2019. 436-454.
- “The Lost German City: Leah Goldberg’s Berlin,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 30, 2019. 143-168 [Hebrew].
- “The Flowers of Shame: Avraham Ben Yitzhak’s Hebrew-German ‘Revival’.” The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange, edited by Amir Eshel and Rachel Seelig. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. 41-60.
- “Translation on the Margins: Avraham Ben Yitzhak and Yoel Hoffmann.” The Journal of Jewish Identities. Volume 7:1, 2014. 109-128.
