I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (2008) where my primary focus was late eighteenth to mid-twentieth century German, French and English literature and visual culture. The challenge motivating my research and my teaching is to articulate the extent and configurations of the subject’s aesthetic freedom – I call it his adventure – in the face of limiting, regulating discourses, primarily legal, political and scientific. I wrote on spies, on exploration and the concept of adventure and on translation and exile.

 

I have taught in the US and in Turkey before returning to Israel.

Prof. Ofer Ashkenazi is a historian of modern Germany and German Jewry and serves as Director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. His research examines the intertwined histories of modern Germany and German Jewry, with particular attention to everyday life in Nazi Germany, German visual culture in the twentieth century, the interwar peace movement, and representations of Nazism and the Holocaust in German culture.

His current research project, conducted together with Prof. Guy Miron, examines Jewish relationships to the German natural landscape.

His recent publications include the monograph:

Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (2025, with Rebekka Grossmann, Sarah Wobick-Segev, and Shira Miron)

and the edited volume:

Rethinking Jewish History and Memory through Photography (2025, co-edited with Thomas Pegelow Kaplan).

 

Walter-Benjamin Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Culture (DAAD).

Prof. Manja Herrmann is a scholar of German and German-Jewish literature and culture, whose research focuses on the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a theoretical emphasis on aspects of transculturalism, travelling concepts and texts, gender, and ecocriticism. She received her PhD in Foreign Literatures and Linguistics from Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva in 2015. Before joining the Department for German Language and Literature as the Walter Benjamin Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Culture, she served as assistant professor and research group leader at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg (2017–2022), the Lilli and Michael Sommerfreund visiting professor for Jewish literature in Heidelberg (2020–2021), as visiting researcher at Universität Freiburg (2021–2022), deputy professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (2023–2024), and a senior research fellow at the University of Hamburg (2024). Her first book on concepts of authenticity in German-Jewish literature and culture was published in 2018 with DeGruyter. Her second book manuscript on travelling narratives on Hasidei Umot ha-Olam in post-war Germany is currently under review. Recently, she started a new project on German-Jewish literature in the Anthropocene.

Chiara Lipp is a trained primary school teacher, doctoral candidate and lecturer specializing in multilingualism, language policy and Jewish education. After earning her Bachelor’s (B.A.) and Master’s degrees (M.Ed.) at the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd, she completed her teacher training at a Jewish primary school in southern Germany. She is currently pursuing a PhD in German Studies with a focus on Interculturality and Multilingualism, researching language policy in (Jewish) primary schools. Her pedagogical career has included positions as a language teacher in Peru and England and at a Montessori school in Baden-Württemberg where she was involved in German as a Second Language (DaZ) support. At the higher education level, she has taught German didactics and multilingualism in education at the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd and Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. Since October 2025, she has held the position of DAAD Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to her academic work, she volunteers as an editor and author for EDA Magazin, the official magazine of the Jewish Student Union Germany (JSUD). Her articles on religious topics are also regularly published in the Jüdische Allgemeine, Germany’s largest Jewish weekly newspaper.

Vivian Liska, Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013, she is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. Liska’s recent books include Giorgio Agamben’s Empty Messianism (2008), in German, translated into Hebrew (Resling 2010), When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008) and Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011). A Hebrew translation of this book is in the making with Hakibbutz Hameuchad. In 2012, she was awarded the Cross of Honor for Sciences and the Arts from the Republic of Austria. She is the (co-)editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association in 2008; Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide (2007); Theodor Herzl between Europe and Zion (2007); What does the Veil Know? (2009); The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (2015); and Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin), co-editor of the Yearbook of the Society for European-Jewish Literature, and arcadia. International Journal of Literary Studies. Her most recent book German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife (Indiana University Press) was published in 2017.

 

 

 

Dr. Asif Rahamim is a Lecturer in the Department of German Language and Literature and the Department of General and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on German and German-Jewish modernism (from the mid-nineteenth century onward) and its intersections with other literary traditions of the period, particularly Hebrew and English literature. His first book, Poetic Cartography: The Ethics of Space in the German–Hebrew Context, is forthcoming with De Gruyter in 2027.

In addition, his research engages with Continental philosophy along the German–French axis, with a particular emphasis on phenomenology and the thought of the Frankfurt School. He also works on contemporary theories of the relationship between poetics and affect, exploring the ethical dimensions of literary form.

His current research project examines the reception of Goethe's Faust in twentieth-century German-Jewish literature and thought.

Dr. Rahamim also serves as the Department's BA Academic Advisor.

 

Prof. Christoph Schmidt was born 1956 in Helsinki, Finland, wrote a PhD about Theodor W. Adorno’s “Hermeneutics of Shock”, i.e. his Philosophy and Aesthetics, Literature and Musical Theory. Since 1995 he teaches at the department for German Literature at the Hebrew University. Schmidt works on problems connected to modern political theology, secular culture, philosophy of arts and the relation between secular culture and religion. His book “The heretical Imperative” (2000) describes the genesis of the cultural sciences in Germany after 1900 and their transformation into German and Jewish forms of political theology. “The Apocalypse of the subject” (2003) focusses on the Dada poet Hugo Ball and his conversion to catholic Theo-politics. “The Theopolitical Hour” (2009) retraces modern Christian and Jewish responses to secular culture and the problem of political theology (Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes). “Israel and the Spirits” (2016) deals with the impact of the Holocaust on the German students’ movement in literature and philosophy until today.
Schmidt has taught at the universities of Tübingen, Giessen, Berlin and Leuven (Belgium). Since 2011 he teaches as well in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Religion.