Background

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi was born on October 31, 1942, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. She is a daughter of Janet Helen DeKoven, a social worker born in Ostrowiec, Poland, who immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve, and Herman Jerome DeKoven, a lawyer from Chicago, Illinois. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, together with her brother Ira Michael DeKoven and sister Mona DeKoven.

Education

After two years at Wellesley College, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi spent her junior year abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Hebrew University in 1965; a Master of Arts in 1968 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1976 from Brandeis University. The Doctor of Humane Letters was presented to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi by the Hebrew Union College in 2019.

Career

Since 1978, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi directed the literature program at the interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught undergraduate and graduate students at the School for Overseas Students. She joined the Department of General and Comparative Literature, where she taught until her retirement as Full Professor in 2012. DeKoven Ezrahi was invited to teach at many universities, including Princeton University (visiting professor, 1997); Duke University (visiting assistant professor, 1984); Susquehanna University (visiting associate professor, 1998); Dartmouth College (visiting professor, 1999); Yale University (visiting fellow, 2000); and the University of Toronto.

Trained in English and American literature, DeKoven Ezrahi gravitated towards Hebrew and Jewish literature, exploring the impact on Jewish aesthetics and ethics of major upheavals in Jewish history. Her first book, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, published in 1980, offered a typology of imaginative responses to the Holocaust and helped to establish an entire area of inquiry. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, published in 2000, represented a new direction in DeKoven Ezrahi's work, and provided a fresh appreciation of the challenges of radical displacement and homecoming over time. This book identifies "diasporic" aesthetics as licensed in an ancient moment by the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been at the center of DeKoven Ezrahi's scholarly and personal concerns. Her current book project, Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center, explores the challenges and privileges of the "return" of the Hebrew imagination to the Holy Land. Beginning by probing the evolution of sacred space in the biblical corpus and in medieval thought, the book then interrogates the aesthetics and ethics of return, focusing on the fictions of Shmuel Yosef Agnon and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, as they faced the sacred center - in their persons and in their writing.

Together with Rabbi Susan Silverman and others, she helped organize the "Kol Dikhfin" initiative that brought asylum seekers from African persecutions together with Jerusalem hosts at Passover Seders in Jerusalem in 2018.

Achievements

• Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has taught at many famous universities. In addition to publishing in major scholarly journals in the United Kingdom and the United States, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has participated in literary and cultural forums in Israel, helping to foster bicontinental exchange. In 2007, she won a Guggenheim fellowship for her project "Jerusalem and the Poetics of Return."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination

    (Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish wr...)

    2000
  • By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature

    (The creative literature that evolved from the Holocaust c...)

    1980

Views

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has always seen her scholarly work as a public responsibility. She hoped to get beyond the narratives of mutual exclusion - Jews and Moslems, Jews and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians, Zionists and Diasporists - in order to create mutually engaging and ultimately liberating exchanges. Her contribution to this conversation presumes an arena of academic and public risk-taking. She has been active for decades in the peace movement in Israel and was a founder of a longstanding dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians that began during the First Intifada in 1988.

Membership

• 

  Modern Language Association , United States

• 

  American Comparative Literature Association , United States

Connections

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is married to Bernard Avishai. Her first husband was Yaron Ezrahi. She has six children (three from her first marriage) and ten grandchildren.

Father:

Herman Jerome DeKoven

Herman Jerome DeKoven was a pioneer of labor law in Chicago.

Mother:

Janet Helen DeKoven

Janet Helen DeKoven worked as a social worker in the city of Chicago and later as a teacher in the reading program at Nichols Junior High in Evanston. In both capacities, her intervention was transformative for the lives of underprivileged youth and young adults. She gave community lectures on subjects ranging from the Bible to modern American literature, enriching the minds and moral imaginations of all those who heard her.

husband:

Bernard Avishai

Bernard Avishai is an Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and formerly taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of several books. He contributes regularly on political economy and Israeli affairs to the New Yorker; and has written dozens of articles for Harper's, The New York Review, The Nation, and New York Times Magazine. He is a former editor of Harvard Business Review.

Ex-husband:

Yaron Ezrahi

Yaron Ezrahi was a highly influential political scientist and commentator on Israeli democracy. He was a political science professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as a former senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. He co-founded The Seventh Eye, Israel's magazine for press criticism noted for guarding professional standards of journalism.

Brother:

Ira Michael DeKoven

Ira Michael DeKoven produced works of iron that grace public and private spaces throughout the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, area and beyond: gates, balconies, screens, railings, sculptures, fountains, tables, fire tools rendered in iron, bronze, copper, aluminum, and enamel are regular features of the local landscape. His designs ranged from classical and intricate to whimsical and idiosyncratic. Typically, he asked a client what his or her "talisman" was, some element of nature or art that would symbolize their inner soul, and would try to incorporate that into his designs.

Ira Michael DeKoven appeared in numerous craft shows and reconstructed 19th-century towns. He had been featured prominently for decades in the shops and fairs of the Piedmont Craftsmen. Ira was also a regular performer at open mics and ensembles throughout the Winston-Salem area. His guitar and harmonica created renditions of many of the folk and blues tunes he had heard in Chicago and others he had perfected along the way.

Sister:

Mona DeKoven Fishbane

Mona DeKoven Fishbane is a clinical psychologist licensed in Illinois and New Jersey, who specializes in treating couples and adult individuals, as well as intergenerational work with adults and their siblings and parents. Her particular focus is on integrating "news from neuroscience" with a systemic approach to therapy. Mona DeKoven Fishbane lectures nationally and internationally and has authored numerous articles and book chapters on couple therapy, intergenerational relationships, and interpersonal neurobiology. She received the 2017 Family Psychologist of the Year Award from the American Psychological Association. Her book, Loving with the Brain in Mind: Neurobiology & Couple Therapy, was published by Norton in 2013.

Friend:

Carmi Charney

Carmi Charney was a United States-born Israeli poet, who wrote under the pseudonym T. Carmi. His background was international; he absorbed French and English, as well as Hebrew literary traditions. T. Carmi is a poet whose vision is at once historical and miraculous. He has, like others of his time and place, an acute awareness of human suffering, and he recognizes the absurdity of individual lives in the context of social and political events. At the same time, his focus is intensely personal, and in many ways close to the surrealist mode of pursuing the marvelous in everyday life by discovering and using strange images close to subconscious thought. In addition to publishing his own poetry, he was editor and translator of two books of Hebrew poetry. Carmi was awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Shlonsky Prize, the Brenner Prize, the Neuman Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, and the Bialik Prize.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's longstanding connection with Hebrew Union College, where she has often lectured and participated in symposia, was cemented when Carmi Charney, asked her to take over his course on Hebrew Literature in 1994, just before he died.