2026 Jewish Heritage Fund Annual Presentation -- Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center
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Figuring Jerusalem explores how Hebrew writers have imagined Jerusalem, both from the distance of exile and from within its sacred walls. For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy Land as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did such writers bring their imagination “home” in the 20th century? Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained in the first half of the twentieth century. Even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. Only in the aftermath of the 1967 War did the temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of exile, as expressed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.
About Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi:
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi grew up in suburban Chicago, and matriculated at Wellesley College, Hebrew University and Brandeis University. She taught at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, but her home base is Jerusalem, where she is Professor Emerita of General and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has written on subjects ranging from representations of the Holocaust in postwar Israeli, European and American culture to the configurations of exile and diasporic compensations in classical, premodern and contemporary Jewish literature. Her critically acclaimed books include By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, and two books in Hebrew. DeKoven Ezrahi became a Guggenheim Fellow for her project on Jerusalem. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in Jerusalem from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Figuring Jerusalem won the National Jewish Book Award.