Maya Barzilai

Maya Barzilai is assistant professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from the Hebrew University in 2002 and her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Her comparative scholarship concerns the emergence of Hebrew literature through adaptation and translation, particularly from and into German and Yiddish. She also studies wartime and post-war (popular) culture and her recent book, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (NYU Press), explores how the infamous monster of clay became a cross-cultural and evolving metaphor of war and its destructiveness. Her next book project is study of Hebrew-German translation in the early to mid-twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between scriptural and literary translation.