Position:

University Research Lecturer

Faculty / College Address:

Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies

Email:

zehavit.stern@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My primary interest is in modern Eastern European Jewish culture, which I examine through a variety of sources including Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, Maskilic polemics, Ashkenazic folk performance, and Yiddish theatre and cinema. I am particularly interested in the modern emergence of collective self-consciousness(s) in Eastern European Jewish culture of the interwar period, and look into the ways in which various authors, historians, filmmakers and other cultural activists re-imagined or invented an Eastern European Jewish art legacy. My work also relates to contemporary appropriations of Yiddish culture in Israel, Europe and the United States.

Current Projects:

• Moyshe's Broderzon's dramatic oeuvre in the context of Russian avant-garde theatre
• Re-imaginations of Old Yiddish in modern Yiddish Literature
• Popular performance and the Hasidic tale in S.Y. Agnon's Hakhnasat Kala

Courses Taught:

• From Old World to Lost World: Yiddish Film and its Afterimages (University of California, Berkeley)
• Inventing Tradition: The Turn to the Past in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature and film (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley)

Recent Publications:

• “Cinema as Site of Memory: The Dybbuk and the Burden of Holocaust Commemoration,” in The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema, Lawrence Baron, ed., (forthcoming in Brandeis University Press,2011).
• The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, Shiri Goren, Hannah Pressman and Lara Rabinovitch, eds. (forthcoming in Wayne State University Press, 2012).
• “Rukhot Refa'im Al Masakh Hakesef: Leshe'elat Ha-Zikaron Ba-Seret Hadibuk 1937," in Al Na Tegarshuni: Iyunim Khadashim Be-ha-dibuk [Do Not Chase Me Away: New Studies on the Dybbuk], Shimon Levy and Dorit Yerusalmi, eds. (Tel-Aviv: Safra Press and Assaph Press at the Tel Aviv University, 2009), 212-236.