Comparative Literature · Jewish Cultural History
Literature at the threshold: between Hebrew and German, page and stage, home and migration.
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Scholar, lecturer, poet and theater-maker.
I study how Jewish writers make a home in language, and what happens to a voice when it crosses borders.
I am a scholar of comparative literature and Jewish cultural history, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My work moves between Hebrew and German literature, modernism, migration, and theater and voice studies.
I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. My dissertation, The Place of Writing: Language and Home in Twentieth-Century Hebrew and German Literature, won the Leo Baeck Prize for the History and Culture of German Jewry. It is now becoming my first book, forthcoming with Indiana University Press.
Before and alongside academia I worked in theater, as a director, playwright, translator and dramaturge, at venues including Tmuna, Habima and the Bialik Museum. That background shapes how I read, teach and speak: I treat texts as things that are performed, heard and passed between people.
I lecture and teach in Hebrew, English and German, for universities, cultural institutions, Jewish education programs and general audiences.
German, Hebrew, and the Paradoxes of the Jewish Home. How Hebrew writers shaped by German language and culture, from Agnon and Leah Goldberg to David Vogel and Dan Pagis, wrote "home" in a language that was never simply their own.
Leah Goldberg, Else Lasker-Schüler and Mascha Kaléko. Reading recorded performance alongside the written text, the project follows what migration does to a poet's voice, and how performed poetry reshaped Jewish public spaces.
Talks for festivals, cultural institutions, communities, schools and universities. Each can be given as a keynote, a seminar session or a short series.
What theater does for a society under pressure, from Greek tragedy to Hanoch Levin and today's Israeli stage.
A Berlin poet forced into exile, heard through her own recorded readings. On what it means to lose, and keep, a voice.
How reading literature trains the empathy and complexity that leaders and educators need, drawing on modern Hebrew and Jewish writing.
The Nobel laureate's German years and the books he carried, and how they shaped the Hebrew masterpieces we know.
Erich Kästner, beloved worldwide for Emil and the Detectives, and the poetry Israeli readers never met.
From the Bible to October 7: how Jewish texts have imagined belonging, responsibility and a shared fate.
Universities, festivals and theaters, Jewish education and leadership programs, museums, communities abroad.
Hebrew, English and German. In person or online.
Keynotes, single lectures, workshops, reading groups and semester courses.
Planning an event, a festival or a course?
Get in touchIndiana University Press, German-Jewish Cultures series. Forthcoming fall 2027.
Jordan Schnitzler First Book Publication Award, Association for Jewish Studies, 2025
Poetry, Hebrew. Edited by Anat Levin. Forthcoming.
Rachel Negev Prize for a First Poetry Book, 2025 · Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts publication grant, 2026
For lectures, courses, collaborations and press, write to me directly.
I usually reply within a few days. Please include the date, the audience and the language of the event.
michal.peles-almagor@mail.huji.ac.il