SIDRA DEKOVEN EZRAHI

SIDRA DEKOVEN EZRAHI is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, currently visiting professor at Duke University, and previously visiting professor at University of Michigan, Yale University, Dartmouth College, Susquehanna University and Princeton University. Professor Ezrahi is American born and educated in the U.S. and Israel.

She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (2000), which was a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award.

She serves as a consultant to "Words and Images: the Jerusalem Project," directed by Nathan Beyrak and Eleonora Lev. The project is creating an international video archive of in-depth interviews with Jewish authors. Writers videotaped thus far include Aharon Appelfeld, Ida Fink, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Amos Oz, Imre Kertesz, Moacyr Scliar and George Konrad. Professor Ezrahi interviewed Grace Paley in 2002 for the project.

Her most recent book, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, represents a departure in her own studies of modern Jewish literature, and attempts to provide a fresh appreciation of the challenges of radical displacement and homecoming in our time. She is currently engaged in a project as a sequel to the arguments developed in Booking Passage, focusing on the recreation of Jewish culture after and in the shadow of Auschwitz. Other projects include an exploration of Jewish humor and further inquiry into the responses in Israeli literature to the legacy of a utopian aesthetic.