Esther Azhari Moyal, born in Beirut in 1873, was a celebrated Jewish journalist, author, literary translator, and feminist who founded an Arabic newspaper for women, translated a dozen novels from French to Arabic, and published an Arabic-language biography of Èmile Zola. Yet de…
In Jewish Studies in general and Jewish literary studies in particular, the autobiography has taken on renewed significance in the twenty-first century. A recent wave of Hebrew autobiographical writing has reinvigorated long-standing debates about the connections between family …
Conflicts and Repetition: The Politics of Poetic Reiteration in Hebrew and Arabic Literatures considers conflict as the basic condition of both politics and literature. In this study, I claim that although there are countless possible ways of conceptualizing conflict, normative …
This dissertation analyzes the works of Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) during the 1890's. It criticaly engages with the entire range of Peretz's literary output during this period in both languages. It argues that Peretz functioned as a literary agent of…
This dissertation takes up the first truly Jewish homosexual identity, which Mordechai Jiří Langer (1894-1943) created in Prague during the 1920s. It is a study of the historical conditions--especially the exclusion of Jews by the masculinist wing of the German homosexual rights…
My dissertation, "The Home Front: Literary Engagement with Political Crisis in Israel, 1993-2006," examines how terror, violence and political turmoil have changed and shaped the private territories of home, family, friendship and intimate relationships in turn of the twenty-fir…
The distinctiveness of this study lies in its being the first attempt to thoroughly examine the entire oeuvre of Dalia Ravikovitch--the 1998 Israel Prize laureate--by offering a reading that combines psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and trauma studies. The dissertation contains …
This dissertation introduces a new literary term, "narrative demand," defined as the internal structure of values or beliefs that makes plot possible in works of fiction, and examines its workings in a sample of texts from the modern Yiddish and Hebrew literary canons. In Aspect…
This dissertation examines the themes of rape and domestic violence in Zionist literature on the “Arab Question” published in Hebrew from the last years of Ottoman rule in Palestine through to the 1929 riots that erupted during the British Mandate. By bringing to light the impor…
This dissertation explores representations of the Jewish female body in Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century. It serves as an intervention in the dominant discourse on the male Jewish body in recent scholarship, and its occlusion of discussions of femininity and fem…
This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century "new media" models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I labe…
The purpose of this thesis is to deal with the origins of chess before AD 500 with attention to the record of sources and commentaries in the Babylonian Talmud. At the same time the names of other games which could be connected with chess are analysed. It is argued that Jews pla…
Appelfeld's novels may be classified according to their relationship to either escaping one's Jewishness or escaping one's memories of the Holocaust. Escaping one's Jewishness is a central theme in Appelfeld's pre-Holocaust novels which include Ke-Ishon Ha-Ayin, (The Apple Of My…