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Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.She taught at Princeton University in 1990- 1992 and was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and 2006, and at Harvard in 2012. During the fall of 2009 she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn and in fall of 2017 she was a fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University. Her...

The Song of Songs is a puzzle: a collection of secular — often erotic— love poetry that stands alone within the sacred books of the Hebrew Bible. Many of these poems are riddles that lead readers to more than one solution. When we read them for the first time, we might think their solution to be patently clear, but a second reading shows another solution, more daring than the first and sometimes its mirror opposite. A sub-group within these riddles are three questions that appear in the book, each of which begins with the words, “Who is she that ….” In this lecture, we will examine and...

For ten years Dory Manor lived in Paris and wrote poetry in Hebrew. Early on in his stay in France he debated trying to shift into French, but soon realized that poetry—as opposed to other sorts of writing—was an art he could perform only in his mother tongue, Hebrew. This is not surprising: as opposed to authors and playwrights, very few modern poets have written in an acquired language. Even poets who were immigrants and exiles generally clung to their mother tongues. The German-language poet, Paul Celan, took it a step further and asserted that, “Only in the mother tongue can one speak...

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

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