Ruth Tsoffar

Ruth Tsoffar is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies and Faculty Associate in the Frankel Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies.

Ruth received her Ph.D. in the Near Eastern Studies Department from The University of California, Berkeley, and has been teaching at the University of Michigan after a short teaching position at Utah University. She is the author of Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture, (Routledge, September 2019) Studies in Comparative Literature and The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women, (Wayne State University Press, 2006) Part of the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, the book was awarded the Elli Kongas Miranda Prize & the National Jewish Book Award finalist.

Tsoffar’s earlier work on Israeli ethnicity focused on the intersection of body, gender, and poetry and was published at Hagar in two complementary studies, "The Body that Crumbled’: Mizrahi Men Writing Poetic Anatomy, Part I”. And “Dissected Identity: Mizrahi Women, Space and Body, Part II” Other works on poetry include her study of Yona Wallach and specifically on issues of sexuality and theatricality in the poem Tefillin.

Her future project includes an ethnogeographic study on the conversion of Jamusin, a Palestinian neighborhood in Northern Tel Aviv to Givat Amal, populated by Jewish immigrants of Middle Eastern origin, and more recently to the luxurious “Akirov towers” in Tel Aviv.

Scholarly Interests: Feminism, sexuality and gender in multicultural society; textuality and theories of reading; poetry and poetics; colonialism, ethnicity, and nationalism; Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian literatures, Biblical narratives, ethnography, and folklore.
Teaching interests include courses such as “The Alternative Jewish Bookshelf,” and “Home, Homeland and Homelessness: Israel and Palestine,” Women, Bible, Reading,” and graduate seminars such as Reading Diversity, and Un/Reading Women of Color. 

Select Publications:

Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture, Studies in Comparative Literature, Routledge, September 2019. 

The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women, Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, Wayne State University Press, January 2006. Elli Kongas Miranda Prize & National Jewish Book Award finalist.

“Staging Sexuality: Reading Wallach's Poetry," Hebrew Studies, Vol. 43, 2002: 87-117. Also in Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 2006)
http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/issue/current

"The Body as a Storyteller: Karaite Women's Experience of Blood and Milk," Journal of American Folklore, 117:1 (463) (Winter 2004): 3-21.

"’The Body that Crumbled’: Mizrahi Men Writing Poetic Anatomy, Part I,” HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol. 4 (1-2), 2003: 89-112.

“Dissected Identity: Mizrahi Women, Space and Body, Part II” HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol. 7 (2) 2007: 35-66.

“Baghdad-Tel Aviv: Round trip to the Promised Land,” Social Thought and Commentary Section, Anthropological Quarterly 79:1 (Winter 2006): 133-144.

“’A Land that Devours its People:’ Mizrahi Writing from the Gut,” Body & Society, Vol. 12 (2): 25-55, 2006.

“The Trauma of Otherness and Hunger: Ruth and Lot’s Daughters,” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Vol. 5 (1), 2007.

Field(s) of Study

• Areas of Interest: Feminism, sexuality, and gender in a multicultural society
• colonialism, ethnicity, and nationalism, poetry and poetics, theories of reading, Israeli, Jewish, and Palestinian literatures, Biblical narratives, ethnography, and folklore.