Brill, Yossi

My teaching focuses on literature written by Mizrahim (Sephardi Jews) in the 20th and 21st centuries. I use representative examples from contemporary Hebrew prose and poetry. With the complex configurations of identity of the Mizrahim, and their relationship to the new narrative of Arab Jews in Israel, the language of Mizrahi literature reflects, but also influences, social and cultural changes in Israel. At the same time, I am interested in the historical and cultural developments of Jewish communities under Islam in modern times, especially in the contours of approximation and separation from the Muslim majority society.

My second interest involves questions of identity and memory in Modern German Literature. In my PhD dissertation, I examined the function of stones in the creation of a language of testimony and memory. Specifically, I focused on the melancholic poetics in the works of Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) and W.G. Sebald (1944–2001). Bernhard and Sebald dealt with the fallout of modernity and the civilizational disasters following the rise of the Third Reich and World War II, and how to process this and express it in words. The stone repeatedly appears in their works as a basic element in the language of memory and the discourse of testimony. Using different narrative strategies, each author uses the language of various stones, as well as the geology of the stones, to create a bleak and sorrowful literary language – a melancholic language – which is at the same time a poetics of memory, a testimony, and an introduction to cultural criticism.

Areas of Interest

Contemporary Mizrahi literature, Jewish communities in the East, German post-war literature

Historical Periods of Interest

19th through 21st centuries CE

Positions

Education

Awards and distinctions