The Object of Jewish Literature:
​A Material History

This project, for which I was awarded an NEH Fellowship, reads 20th century Jewish literature through the lens of material culture, analyzing the material qualities of texts, the depiction of things, and discourse about materiality during a period shaped by migration, the Shoah and social, political upheaval. Examining how transition and rupture have refashioned Jewish textuality as material culture will enrich our sense of literature's complex relation to its physical surroundings. Jewish writing emerges from a culture whose theological tradition has an ambivalent relation to embodied forms such as idols. Thus Jewish writing is an ideal forum for exploring how literature deploys objects as emblems of ideas and emotions, and how books may function as things. Treating a wide variety of genres, a material analysis of Jewish writing will sharpen our understanding of how secular culture is indebted to traditional religious forms. Moving beyond language and place, my material reading suggests new, transnational models of identity.  

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Sites of Memory in Israel/Palestine

Landscape and memory continue to be ongoing research interests; an essay analyzing the textual and physical traces of Palestinian memory in the Jaffa neighborhood of Ajami, “'An Apartment to Remember':  Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape," appears in History & Memory (2015).


Watch this short testimony, filmed in 2012 during an on-site visit with Zochrot to the remains of the village of Summeyl.