Description:

“Loss, Bereavement, and Otherness: The Poetics of Yehudit Hendel”, with Guy Ehrlich, Northwestern University

Tuesday, March 4, 12:30 p.m.
Black Studies Seminar Room, Crowe 5-138

(Kosher lunch will be served – please RSVP by Friday, February 28 )

Yehudit Hendel (1921–2014) was a prominent Israeli author. Her first stories were published in the 1940s, distinguishing her as virtually the only woman writer among the 1948 generation of Hebrew authors (Dor Tashah). Having published ten books as well as numerous literary essays in her lifetime, Hendel attracted considerable scholarly and critical attention and received several literary awards, including the Israel Prize for Hebrew Literature (2003). However, her position within the literary canon remains ambivalent and marginal, in part due to her otherness and subversiveness. This lecture focuses on her subversive writing of bereavement, challenging Israeli social and cultural norms while embracing a poetics of melancholia.

Guy Ehrlich is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. Previously, he was an Einstein Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in modern Hebrew literature, Israeli culture, gender studies, and queer theory. His book, titled The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel, won the Yaacov Bahat Prize for Best Original Scholarly Book Manuscript in Hebrew and was recently published by Haifa University Press (2024). His articles have been published in Mikan: Journal for Literary Studies (2019), Jewish Social Studies (2020), Ot: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory (2021), Shofar (2024), and Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature (edited by Anchit Sathi and Alice Ferrebe, Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2024).