(The creative literature that evolved from the Holocaust c...)
The creative literature that evolved from the Holocaust constitutes an unprecedented encounter between art and life. Those who wrote about the Holocaust were forced to extend the limits of their imaginations to encompass unspeakably violent extremes of human behavior. The result, as Ezrahi shows in By Words Alone, is a body of literature that transcends national and cultural boundaries and shares a spectrum of attitudes toward the concentration camps and the world beyond, toward the past and the future.
Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination
(Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish wr...)
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return."
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is a United States educator, writer, author, scholar, who has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for many years. Her writing themes are Holocaust in literature and Jewish exile and homecoming.
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.
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.
(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
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United States
American Comparative Literature Association
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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.