Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi
Biographic Data
| ID | 1566754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sidra Dekoven |
| FAMILY NAME | Ezrahi |
| SIGNATURE | EZRAHI S D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7574-765X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel
This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the c…
The Shtetl and Its Afterlife
This essay looks at both Buczacz, the Galician hometown of Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, and Jerusalem, the adopted city/town of the writer who became S. Y. Agnon, modern Israel's most prominent Hebrew writer and only Nobel Prize winner. Like Jerusalem, the generic shtetl proved over time to be primordial, protean, and portable as a point of reference in Jewish culture and memory. Juxtaposing the “shtetl” as monolithic space with the “city” as he…
S. Y. Agnon's Jerusalem
A bstr Act This essay explores S. Y. Agnon’s Jerusalem in a number of texts, spanning nearly his entire life—and beyond, into posthumous publications. I argue that the two constitutive events of the 1940s—the Shoah and the war of 1948 that led to the establishment of the State of Israel—hardly figure in Agnon’s representation of Jerusalem, which remains largely an anachronistic site of pre-1948 pilgrimage and millennial visions. Rather than inter…
Jew-ish
Ask anybody who knows Grace Paley's writing, or who knew Grace, if she was a “Jewish” writer, and you’ll likely get the same stunned look you’d get if you inquired whether the sky was blue. Press on, and you’ll get an elaboration as slippery as an inventory of the firmament's “color.” That Paley escapes, Houdini-like, from all the categories that would contain her – that the impact of her prose and her poetry is registered in our solar plexus – i…
Fiction and Memory
Fiction and Memory:Zakhor Revisited Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi (bio) It is hard to overstate the influence of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor on contemporary academic and popular constructions of Jewish history and memory; it is hard to imagine a scholarly endeavor or university syllabus in any area of Jewish studies that has not been affected by the book that started its life as the Stroum Lectures more than twenty-five years ago. Like Erich Auerbach'…
Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses
The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif , whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and…
‘Representing Auschwitz’
After Such Knowledge, What Laughter
Booking Passage
See Under
It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless. Suspended in a metal shaft over the sea whose waters commingle Spain and France, these words by Walter Benjamin are etched into a thick plate of glass that keeps the visitor to his memorial from sharing his fate. Descending the vertiginous steps in the shaft, one's own shadow is projected onto the sea…
Fiction and Memory
Fiction and Memory:Zakhor Revisited Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi (bio) It is hard to overstate the influence of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor on contemporary academic and popular constructions of Jewish history and memory; it is hard to imagine a scholarly endeavor or university syllabus in any area of Jewish studies that has not been affected by the book that started its life as the Stroum Lectures more than twenty-five years ago. Like Erich Auerbach'…
Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses
The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif , whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and…
Booking Passage
See Under
It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless. Suspended in a metal shaft over the sea whose waters commingle Spain and France, these words by Walter Benjamin are etched into a thick plate of glass that keeps the visitor to his memorial from sharing his fate. Descending the vertiginous steps in the shaft, one's own shadow is projected onto the sea…
After Such Knowledge, What Laughter
Booking Passage
‘Representing Auschwitz’
Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses
The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif , whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and…
Fiction and Memory
Fiction and Memory:Zakhor Revisited Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi (bio) It is hard to overstate the influence of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor on contemporary academic and popular constructions of Jewish history and memory; it is hard to imagine a scholarly endeavor or university syllabus in any area of Jewish studies that has not been affected by the book that started its life as the Stroum Lectures more than twenty-five years ago. Like Erich Auerbach'…
Jew-ish
Ask anybody who knows Grace Paley's writing, or who knew Grace, if she was a “Jewish” writer, and you’ll likely get the same stunned look you’d get if you inquired whether the sky was blue. Press on, and you’ll get an elaboration as slippery as an inventory of the firmament's “color.” That Paley escapes, Houdini-like, from all the categories that would contain her – that the impact of her prose and her poetry is registered in our solar plexus – i…
S. Y. Agnon's Jerusalem
A bstr Act This essay explores S. Y. Agnon’s Jerusalem in a number of texts, spanning nearly his entire life—and beyond, into posthumous publications. I argue that the two constitutive events of the 1940s—the Shoah and the war of 1948 that led to the establishment of the State of Israel—hardly figure in Agnon’s representation of Jerusalem, which remains largely an anachronistic site of pre-1948 pilgrimage and millennial visions. Rather than inter…
The Shtetl and Its Afterlife
This essay looks at both Buczacz, the Galician hometown of Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, and Jerusalem, the adopted city/town of the writer who became S. Y. Agnon, modern Israel's most prominent Hebrew writer and only Nobel Prize winner. Like Jerusalem, the generic shtetl proved over time to be primordial, protean, and portable as a point of reference in Jewish culture and memory. Juxtaposing the “shtetl” as monolithic space with the “city” as he…
From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel
This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the c…
Art (9 works) · History (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Theology (4 works) · History (3 works) · Judaism (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)