NAOMI SEIDMAN

NAOMI SEIDMAN grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in the Orthodox community of Boro Park, Brooklyn. She received her B.A. from Brooklyn College and her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied Hebrew and Yiddish literature. She is now the Associate Professor of Jewish Culture and the Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, explored the connections between Yiddish and femininity and Hebrew and masculinity in the traditional Ashkenazic world. Her sophisticated history is the first book-length exploration of the sexual politics underlying the "marriage" of Hebrew and Yiddish, and it has profound implications for understanding the centrality of language choices and ideologies in the construction of modern Jewish identity. Professor Seidman particularly examines this sexual-linguistic system as it shaped the work of two bilingual authors, S.Y. Abramovitsh, the "grand-father" of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature; and Dvora Baron, the first modern woman writer in Hebrew (and a writer in Yiddish as well).

She is coeditor and translator of a collection of short stories by Dvora Baron, The First Day and Other Stories (University of California Press; 2001) and Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer (California, 1997).

Professor Seidman has worked as a translator from Hebrew and Yiddish and published a wide range of essays and short stories, including Raised by Jews: Reflections on a Belated Apostasy. Her present research is toward a project entitled Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation.