Rachel S. Harris is Associate Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Her most recent book is Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State Press, 2017)
Rachel S. Harris
By Rachel S. Harris
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Community How to judge Trump’s impeachment trial? Look to the story of Hanukkah.
Extensive, often never-before-seen footage of the riots at the Capitol on Jan. 6, shown this week during former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, is a terrible, powerful depiction of the bloodlust and violence exhibited by the men and women who stormed the Capitol. Their only aim was to stop the certification of the electoral…
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Community Why Are Jewish Studies Syllabi So White And Male?
What is on your syllabus this year? When I first inherited the syllabus for a survey in modern Jewish literature, the assigned readings suggested that everyone used to live in a little shtetl in Eastern Europe and speak Yiddish. Those who weren’t killed in the Holocaust had moved to New York where they lived secular…
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Community Who Is The Real Victim In The Seduction Story Of Joseph And Potiphar’s Wife?
In the book of Genesis, Joseph works for an Egyptian master, Potiphar, and has control over all of his master’s worldly goods. He’s handsome and young — and Potiphar’s wife desire’s him. She asks him to sleep with her but he declines. Day after day she persists, and finally, on a day when no one…
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Community MeToo: Academia Has Its Fair Share Of Sexual Predators
When I was a graduate student I met a professor at a conference overseas who attended my panel and showed interest in my research. He offered to read my work and provide constructive feedback. Several weeks later he told me he was coming to the country I lived in for a conference and asked if…
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Culture Tuvia Ruebner, a Poet of Tragedy and Dissent
In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner By Tuvia Ruebner, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back Hebrew Union College/University of Pittsburgh Press, 396 pages, $39.95 Tuvia Ruebner is a poet’s poet. Though distinguished and admired in Hebrew and German literary circles, and despite having publishing 15 books of poetry in Hebrew, he was little…
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Opinion Fiction and Farce: Democracy at the MLA
Thinkstock I would love to say that powerful argument won the day. I’d like to claim that intellect and facts persuaded the members, and whether the resolution was won or lost, its decisive outcome was a result of profound and significant reflection. The first resolution before the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly served to censure…
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Opinion First They Came For the Humanities…
Thinkstock This year’s MLA was supposed to be discussing the crisis of affairs in the Humanities. Only a lucky few of the graduate students on the market with their freshly minted PhDs will find jobs in academia — ever. The increasing corporatization of higher education is driving the scholarly agenda, as funders begin to dictate…
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Opinion MLA Panel Is High On Emotion, Low On Facts
‘It Impacts People’: Professors and scholars are debating the boycott of Israel at the MLA. // Thinkstock Vote Your Conscience! Well, that was certainly the message at session 48 of the MLA, billed as a roundtable discussion of “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine.” “There is no us and them, only us and…
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