Distinguished Professor of Humanities.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French & Italian (and by courtesy, he is affiliated with the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures/ILAC, the Department of German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). As a scholar, Gumbrecht focuses on the histories of the national literatures in Romance language (especially French, Spanish, and Brazilian), but also on German literature, while, at the same time, he teaches and writes about the western philosophical tradition (almost exclusively on non-analytic philosophy) with an emphasis on French and German nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. In addition, Gumbrecht tries to analyze and to understand forms of aesthetic experience 21st-century everyday culture. Over the past forty years, he has published more than two thousand texts, including books, translated into more than twenty languages. In Europe and in South America, Gumbrecht has a presence as a public intellectual; whereas, in the academic world, he has been acknowledged with Honorary Doctorates (twelve in all) from universities in Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, and Georgia; with the most recent from Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Germany) in July 2017. He has also held a large number of visiting professorships, at the Collège de France, University of Lisbon, University of Manchester, and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, among others. In the spring of 2017, he was a Martin Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He recently taught in the Stanford’s Bing Overseas Program at the campus in Santiago, Chile (spring quarter 2018).

A book project tentatively entitled “A Phenomenology of the Human Voice” is currently in progress.

Chiara Caradonna is Senior Lecturer at the Departments of Romance Studies and of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 2017 and was a Postdoc-fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University (2017-21). In the winter semester 2025-36 she is visiting fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. She works on the intersections between literature, continental philosophy, anthropology, photography and cinema from an ecocritical and decolonial perspective. In her book Opaque. Shadows of Knowledge in the “Meridian” and in the poem “Schwanengefahr” (Wallstein 2020) she analyzed epistemological and hermeneutic aspects of Paul Celan’s later poetry, on which she has also published several articles and co-edited a book (Wallstein 2023). She further specializes on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s theory and practice of notation across genres, and has been focusing on the modern and contemporary literature of Sicily, investigating both the modern reception of the island’s Arab-Muslim past, and the depiction of fishermen communities in Italian literature and film.

Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

I am a social and cultural historian of 19^th and 20^th centuries. My approach is transdisciplinary drawing on such subdisciplines as political history, the history of mentalities, oral history, gender history, history of ideas, and micro-history. My fields of expertise are: history of modern Western Europe; the history of Italy and of its Jewry; memory studies and Shoah studies; the history of antisemitism and racism; the history of fascist and neo-fascist thought; the methodology and philosophy of history.

Within the field of socio-cultural history, I consider myself a scholar positioned at the crossroads of studies on ideology, phenomenology and hermeneutics, their convergence, and their dialectical relation to and influence on issues such as: complex system of secular and religious beliefs (popular and elites), power relations, public narratives and collective practices, social and political violence and justice, and question of time and space. My trajectories lead me to engage in investigations into history and myth, on the discourse of politics and religion, and on the reproduction of mythopoetic structures, at the core of which I place the question of the sacred as a cornerstone of understanding majority/minorities relations. 

My methodology has developed along the lines established by the Italian school of historiography derived from Federico Chabod, Delio Cantimori and Carlo Ginzburg. It also draws insights from the work of the anthropologist, ethnographer and historian of religion Ernesto De Martino, and his work on the stratification of popular and official forms of religious practices. Other sources of inspiration along my path have been the Annales School, as well as Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte and its relations to the epistemology of history. Another influence has been Emile Benveniste’s linguistics, particularly the distinction he draws between meaning and what he terms designation guided my understanding of philology and anthropology.

I am completing in those days a short manuscript (120 pp.+ bibliography) on Primo Levi entitled Primo Levi as Job in Search of his Roots. On Evil, Suffering and Survival after the Camps. It has been accepted for publications by the CPL Editions New York, and it will appear in spring-summer 2023.

I am working on another book composed of articles on the topic Julius Evola as a Totalitarian, Racist and Antisemitic. A Study on Etiology of Hate.  Julius Evola (1898–1974) has been one of the most misunderstood and controversial authors of the twentieth century. Evola a political organicist and an antisemite, in encountering the work of René Guénon, embraced his concept of the Tradition and his critique of the modern world, believing that Tradition was an idea which should encompass the social as well as the spiritual world.

Two individual books which have grown out of the work of Julius Evola:

The first project is titled: “The Evolians: Super-Fascists, Neo-Fascists, Ethno-Nationalists. A Comparative Study in the Very Political Impact of the Meta-Political Alt-Right.” I explore and retrace the influence exercised by Julius Evola’s ideology after WWII and its formative impact on the European and international radical right in its Conservative Revolutionary, neo-fascist, and New Right manifestations. The second project is titled “Amnesty and Amnesia. Palmiro Togliatti and the Communist Politics of Oblivion, 1946-1956”. Starting from the amnesty of Togliatti, Minister of Justice in the first government of the Republic after the fall of fascism, the research aims to analyze the seductive binomial Amnesty, and Amnesia as if they were two synonyms, inspired by the work of Nicole Loraux on the Greek polis.

I am part of two new international research group projects. One is “The Global Papacy of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958” is supported by a Max Weber Foundation Five Years Grant in conjunction with the  Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom & the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Warschau, the École Francaise de Rome and Oxford University.

The first:  “The Global Papacy of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958” is supported by a Max Weber Foundation Five Years Grant in conjunction with the  Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom & the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Warschau, the École Francaise de Rome and Oxford University. The second:  International Research Training Group "Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond" (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leipzig University, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow) Proposal-Stage / Antragsphase (DFG)

In addition, in 2017, I initiated three new publications of books and e-journal series, in which I serve as editor in chief:  1) The Vidal Sassoon Studies in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice, a peer-reviewed book series published by De Gruyter, which offers a high-level platform within academia for understanding the historical and contemporary contexts of antisemitism and racism. 2) Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism – Acta. A peer-reviewed, open access e-Journal for De Gruyter Publisher that allows for a prompt publication of contributions that analyze current phenomena of antisemitic and racist prejudices, occurrences, and mechanisms of broader discriminations against targeted social groups. (See the SICSA Website Publications Series). 3) The Gold Rimmed Glasses by Magnes University Press (since 2019). The series is named after the title of Giorgio Bassani’s 1958 novel Gli occhiali d’oro set in the North Italian city of Ferrara. It aims to introduce the Israeli public to carefully curated unpublished Hebrew translations of noteworthy Italian books from the 20th and 21st Century and to offer new, thought-provoking and original insights, shedding lights on literary, historical and cultural issues.

 

I have been a lecturer in the Department of French (later, Department of Romance and Latin-American Languages) at the Hebrew University since 1990. I have taught French as foreign language (beginners and advanced), as well as courses in text reading and in oral skills. My teaching experience, as well as my expertise in theater (director of Théâtr’Acte, the French language theater), literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, enabled me to teach French through play and thus stimulate students' curiosity. In my beginners' course, I offer a global linguistic approach to language, in which prosody, syntax, and phonetic spelling take on an importance equal to that of grammar or semantics. In my course for advanced students, French culture takes on a predominant role. I develop the course through a series of themes, each comprising a group of texts, films, poems and songs. The course program includes invited guest speakers including Sabine Huynh (translator, writer and poet), Jackie Feldman (professor of anthropology), and Delphine Horvilleur (woman rabbi and writer). I composed a low-priced "modular" manual for students, which enables me to provide new texts each academic year. I teach grammar from a practical viewpoint, not for its own sake, but as a tool for mastering the language. In my text-reading course, the personal method I developed begins with instruction in reading Alexandrine verses. The rhythm, line breaks, and breath pauses initiate the students into the prosody of the French sentence and facilitate its understanding. The course in oral language skills is based entirely on theater exercises, which have long been considered a key tool in teaching foreign language (see my article on this subject: https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/nrsc/issue/view/189)
Theater encourages group cohesion, develops self-confidence, stimulates desire and makes the French language not only a means of practical communication but also one of creative self-expression. The class often culminates in a final theater performance at the end of the year, which is a source of great excitement for the students. As part of this theater project, I was invited with one of my classes to perform an original play I wrote, based on students' exercises - Nous Autres - in Dijon and at La Cartoucherie in Paris in February 2016.

I hold an MA degree in French literature from the Hebrew University (1996). An MA in psychoanalysis from Université Diderot, Paris (2014), as well as a license as a certified psychodrama therapist from the Kibbutz Seminar College (2000). I also received a teachers' certificate from Hebrew University (1983).

Studied Philosophy at the University of Rome (currently "La Sapienza University"), earning his doctorate degree with a dissertation on Aesthetics and Literary Theory (1974).

Since 1976 he has been teaching at the Department of Italian Literature at the Hebrew University. He has also taught at the Department of Hebrew Literature (1978-9, 1986-7), the Department of Comparative Literature of Bar Ilan University (1990-1), and the "University Statale" of Milano (where he lectured on Italian translations of Hebrew Literature, 2003-8). Presently, he teaches at the Department of Romance and Latino American Studies at the Hebrew University, as a Teaching-Fellow. He has worked as an editor (for Keter Publishing House, 1988-9), published articles on literary criticism (in "Haaretz" Daily), and is still involved in intensive translation activities, from Italian into Hebrew and vice versa. Translating into Italian, he has published several anthologies of poems by Amichai, Zach and Wieseltier, as well as a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Israeli poetry, "Poeti israeliani" (Torino, Einaudi 2007). Translating into Hebrew he has published an anthology of Modernistic Italian Poetry, a new version of Boccaccio's "Decameron" (completing and editing the unfinished Gaio Sciloni's translation), and the first Hebrew translation of Vico's "The New Science"(Jerusalem, Shalem Press 2005). His Hebrew translation of Primo Levi's poems has been published in 2012 (Jerusalem, Carmel Publishing House). At present he is completing the first Hebrew translation of Galileo Galilei's "Dialogue concerning the two Chief World Systems".  He published several literary essays on Modern Italian literature (on Svevo, Pirandello, Moravia, Pavese, Bassani, Calvino and others), as well as many comparative studies about the relationships between Italian and Hebrew literatures  in  Renaissance and Baroque periods, among them : "Per una classificazione delle ottave di Josef Zarfati " (Italia VIII, 1-2, 1989, ps. 75-86, in Heb.)  ; "Poetiche della scuola ebraico-italiana" (La Rassegna mensile di Israel, vol. LX, n. 12, gennaio-giugno 1994, pp. 189-226); "Lingua letteraria e lingua santa nel Leson Limmudim di Moseh Hayyim Luzzatto", (in: Luzzatto Voghera – Perani (ed.), "Ramhal – Pensiero ebraico e kabbalah tra Padova ed Eretz Israel", Padova, Esedra 2010,  pS. 97-114). His major publication in this area of research is a full annotated edition of the Baroque Hebrew poet Joshua Levi of Venice ("A cup of consolation and other elegies", Jerusalem, Ben-Zvi Institute 2013). He is an adviser for the National Council of World Literature (Translations from World Literature), and a member of the Israeli Editorial Board of the "Rassegna mensile di Israel". He was awarded the International Flaiano Prize for Italian Studies, for his translation of Vico's "The New Science" (2006). His research focuses on comparative analysis of Hebrew and Italian literary texts, on Poetics and Literary Theory, and on Theory of Translation. His fields of study are: Medieval and Modern Italian Literature, Hebrew-Italian Poetry and Poetics.

Yoav Rinon is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Classics at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He trained in both fields at the Hebrew University where he received his Ph.D. His scholarly work reflects the integration of these  complementary disciplines, focusing on questions of ethics and poetics. His publications include: The World of the Marquis de Sade, Homer and the Dual Model of the Tragic, a verse translation of and commentary (with Luisa Ferretti-Cuomo ) on Dante's Inferno (in Hebrew), and The Crisis in the Humanities (in Hebrew). He is now working on a book on questions of identity in the work of Walter Benjamin.

Visiting Professor
Camelia Suleiman (Ph.D. Linguistics, Georgetown University), is an associate professor at the Linguistics and Languages department at Michigan State University. She has led the Arabic Program from 2012-2020. Her research interests are in the Sociolinguistics of Arabic and its contact with Hebrew, on language, race and gender and the nation, language and the media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her publications include: The Politics of Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Analysis. University of Edinburgh Press. May 2017, and Language and Identity in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: The Politics of Self-Perception in the Middle East. November, 2011. London: I.B. Tauris Press. Her articles appeared in ‘Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Pragmatics, Middle East Critique, The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Social Media and Society, and others. Her research also received several awards, press releases, and media coverage.

Yuval Tal is a lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies and the European Forum at the Hebrew University. Yuval is a historian of modern France and the French colonial Empire in North Africa. His research brings the history of Christians, Muslims, and Jews from across Europe and the Mediterranean into a shared analytical framework. This desegregated method allows him to bridge the divide between national and imperial histories of Europe, and bring into view sublimated ethnic premises and biases that haunt European liberal democracies.Yuval is currently completing his book manuscript, “The Republic Estranged: Catholics, Muslims, and Jews in Colonial Algeria.” The book shows how interactions in Algeria between Muslims, Catholics, and Jews shaped the making of the French nation-state, and argues that France’s republican project of national assimilation was predicated on the notion that only Catholic Europeans were a priori capable of becoming French.

Yuval is also working on a new research project, “The Limits of Solidarity: Ethnicity and Class Politics in the French Mediterranean, 1918-1962.” This project explores interactions between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish workers in labor unions and during strikes in the Mediterranean cities of Marseille, Algiers, and Constantine.

Yuval’s published articles include: “The ‘Latin’ Melting-Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigrant Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria,” French Historical Studies 44:1 (2021); “The Social Logic of Colonial Anti-Judaism: Revisiting the Anti-Jewish Crisis in French Algeria, 1889-1902," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 30 (2018); and "Jewish and Sexual Identities in the Works of George Mosse," Hayo Haya - A Young Forum for History 9 (2012).

Yuval received his PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2020 and was a fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in 2021-22.

 

Gur Zak is a senior lecturer who completed his PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2008. His primary research interest lies in the interrelations between literature and ethics in the later Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance, with a particular emphasis on the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. His first book, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self, was published by Cambridge UP in 2010. His second book is entitled Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature. His current research project deals with literary, philosophical, and theological attitudes to compassion in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He has published articles on medieval and Renaissance literature in journals such as Speculum, MLN, and I Tatti Studies, and have contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature. Besides his work on Italian Renaissance Literature, he is also interested in the history of autobiography from antiquity to the present and contemporary theories of affects.  

Bonjour, ciao! My name is Natan, I come from Brazil and have been living in Jerusalem for the past four years. I work as a tutor in the Department of Romance Studies, where I am finishing my BA-degree alongside Comparative Literature. In my opinion, our department provides a great opportunity to widen one’s horizons, to meet people with diverse backgrounds and to learn a lot of exciting new things. Here I found a space to develop my two great passions, literature and languages.

I will be happy to help anyone who is interested in joining our amazing department!

Benjamin Freidenberg is a film director who graduated with honors from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School Jerusalem. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Romance Studies and lectures at the Bezalel Academy's Screen-Based Arts Department. Supervised by Dr. Yona Hanhart-Marmor, his dissertation focuses on film language research developed in Post-WWII France inspired by the intersection between literature and the arts. Parallel with his work in the film industry, he studied linguistics for a bachelor's and master's degrees. Supervised by Prof. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, his thesis dealt with the linkage between historical linguistics and the development of the filmic craft, specifically targeting the syntax and semantics of film. This interdisciplinary study which engages linguistics and cinema studies, involved the research of semantic changes in verbs indicating object movement and comparing it with historical changes in the meaning of camera movement in films.  Among his research interests: historical syntax, aesthetics, metaphor and metonymy, visual vs. textual aspects of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya and ancient Asian script.

 

Member of the Israel Film Academy and contributor to film preservation projects at the Israel Film Archive in the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the Judaica Division Images Collections of Harvard University. Recipient of the America-Israel scholarships for outstanding artists and the International Association of Film & Television Schools' prize for outstanding filmmakers and scholars.  

My name is Eva Himo Saadeh, I am 33 years old and a mother of 4 children. I was born in Israel and lived in Jerusalem my whole life. Among the many languages I learned in school – English, Arabic, Hebrew and French – I loved French the most. Since then, my love for French never faded, and therefore I decided to study French literature and translation at university. So, after many discussions with my parents, I enrolled at the university as a student of French. For me, studying French is a great pleasure and a treasure. In 2010 I finished my B.A-degree in French and have been working as a French teacher until today. At the same time, I kept participating in a “café littéraire” (literary café) where we read and analyzed works of French literature together. I had no doubts that the Hebrew University would be the most suitable place for me to fulfill my dream, expand my knowledge and get my M.A. in French. Despite all the ups and downs, I still feel incredibly excited to learn more. After fulfilling my dream and getting my master’s degree I would like to change my whole life, and I look forward to working with my certificate since it is my pleasure, and to overcome all the hard phases I passed through in order to be well educated and sufficiently empowered. To learn languages is always wonderful, but to learn French is a treasure and a pleasure.

My name is Asaf Koliner, born and raised in Israel.

As a lover of cinema as well as history, I attended the ‘Sam Spiegel’ film school, and later moved on to complete a B.A. in ‘History and Film Studies’ and a M.A. in Philosophy in the Hebrew University (specializing in Aesthetics, Historiography, and Intellectual History). My M.A. thesis examined closely the aesthetics and narrational processes of a very unique semi-documentary semi-history film called ‘La Commune (Paris, 1871)’ by director Peter Watkins (France, 1999).

I am currently working on my doctoral thesis, whose subject is the engagement with socio-political issues through the use of generic modes of expression in the Italian popular cinema of the 1970's. The case of Italian cinema was a calculated, yet a natural, choice for me. No other national cinema was as committed as Italy’s to the representation of the socio-political problems of its country. Yet, it is little known that this commitment extended beyond the unique works of Italy’s film “artists”, and far into the vast universe of popular genres.

All along this road, it seems, I was preoccupied in one way or another with the phenomenology of genre, this already-familiar pattern of story or aesthetics that we intuitively recognize in works of fiction. I believe that identifying and interpreting the diverse genres that might appear in texts is an excellent tool for the cultural historians, a tool that might allow them to retrace, alongside the formal continuations and transformations that characterize the evolution of genres, also the evolutions of ideas, values, and ideologies.

My name is Maayan Taharani, I am from Israel, am 30 years old and am an MA-Student at the Department of Romance Studies at the Hebrew University. I spent the last 5 years of my life in Europe, where I completed a double BA-degree in Foreign Languages, Literature and Intercultural Studies in the curriculum of Italian-German Bilateral Studies at the Universities of Florence (Italy) and Bonn (Germany). In particular, I chose to study German and Spanish language, literature and linguistics. I also joined courses on Art History, Geography, History of Cinema and Italian theatre, among others.

 

I enrolled in the Master-Program of the Department of Romance Studies in order to further deepen my knowledge of Italian culture and contemporary Italian literature. I also look forward to joining the classes on translation and translation studies that are offered in the Master’s framework. During my Master-Degree, I intend to carry out research on a topic that connects Italian and Hebrew linguistics with contemporary Italian literature.

 

In the future, I would love to return to Italy and find a job there thanks to the skills that I will acquire during my Master. Don’t hesitate to contact me for any question you might have about life in Italy and the Master Program at the Department of Romance Studies!

 

Professor Moshe Sluhovsky is the Vigevani Chair in European Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He is the chair of the Department of History and of the university’s Amirim honors program.  Prior to beginning his career at Hebrew University, Professor Sluhovsky taught at Caltech and UCLA. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at The Hebrew University and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Currently an Advanced Research Distinguished Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Professor Sluhovsky was previously a fellow of the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Davis Center at Princeton University.

Professor Sluhovsky’s principal research interests concern the religious history of early modern Europe.  He places particular emphasis on how the religious changes that took place during the Reformation and subsequent Catholic Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries impacted men and women differently.   Among his many published works on religious history, Professor Sluhovsky is the author of Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern France, andBelieve not Every Spirit: Demonic Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism.  He has also written five Hebrew textbooks on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and on magic and popular culture in early modern Europe.  He is currently completing a book tentatively titled, Practices of the Self: Modern Subjecthood and Early Modern Catholicism.