Maya Barzilai

Maya Barzilai completed her M.A. in Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches twentieth century German, Hebrew, and Yiddish post-war literature and film. She has written about the alignment of female figures with the traumatic aporia of the Shoah in an essay entitled “Facing the Past and the Female Specter in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants” (published in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion). She recently received the Horst Frenz prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for a collaborative presentation on “The Challenge of Lyric Address in War Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann and Yitzhak Laor.” While living in Israel, Maya was active in the Palestinian-Israeli solidarity group, Ta’ayush (“living together”), which organizes joint protest marches, work days, and convoys to the Occupied Territories. She writes poetry in Hebrew and English, and her poem “The Sleepwalkers” appeared in a recent issue of the journal Bridges dedicated to writings by Israeli women on seeking peace.