Zehavit Stern

Zehavit Stern is a researcher of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and Yiddish film, theatre and folklore, currently teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds an MA in Yiddish literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). Between 2010 and 2015 she was the Idel and Isaac Haase Fellow in Eastern European Jewish Civilization at the University of Oxford. She has published on Yiddish and Hebrew literature and on Yiddish film and theatre, and is currently completing her book manuscript titled “Reclaiming Barbarism: Eastern European Jewish Folk Performance and The Invention of a National Heritage,” in which she examines the interwar fascination with the purim-shpil and the badkhn and the emergence of the narrative that presents these folk performances as art heritage.