About

Maya Barzilai is a Professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Culture and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the development of twentieth-century Hebrew literature within comparative contexts, exploring (self-)translations among Hebrew, German, and Yiddish. She has written extensively on Hebrew authors such as Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Leah Goldberg, and Yoel Hoffman, analyzing their works' translational dialogues with European languages and literatures. Her first book, 'Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters,' examines how golem narratives have traveled across various media and languages to address issues related to modern technology, warfare, and Jewish persecution. Her current project, 'Translation Beyond Zionism,' investigates translations between Hebrew and German by early twentieth-century writers and thinkers, emphasizing the political and emotional stakes of these exchanges. Barzilai's work offers insights into the politics of emotion in translation and the cultural intersections between Hebrew and German literary traditions. She is also affiliated with the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies and is an expert in Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and English literature and cinema, with teaching interests spanning film, comics, and societal issues related to identity and translation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Sociology
• History
• Artificial Intelligence
• Speech recognition
• Anthropology
• Media studies
• Library science
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Fashion and Whiteness in American Jewish Immigration Films (1907–1975)

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-09-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines how American filmmakers used clothing and lighting to project images of Jewish immigrants on the silver screen, from early black-and-white films to the 1970s. By examining Cohen’s Fire Sale (1907), Hungry Hearts (1922), and Hester Street (1975), the chapter traces the evolution of American cinema from stereotypical portrayals to complex narratives about acculturation and identity. The intense preoccupation with shoes, hats, and “American clothes” reflects the involvement of Jews as producers and consumers of twentieth-century fashion and film. These components of the mise-en-scène function as visual shorthand for social mobility, gender expectations, and racial stratification. In Hungry Hearts, lighting effects “whiten” the daughter while emphasizing her mother’s otherness, revealing Jewish assimilatory anxieties. By contrast, Hester Street offers a feminist perspective that complicates assimilation narratives through nuanced lighting and sartorial choices. This comparative analysis demonstrates how fashion and lighting enabled the cinematic negotiation of whiteness, particularly for women. It also reveals how the desire for whiteness was counterbalanced by the critical understanding of its impossibility across the history of American Jewish immigrant representation.

  PublisherDOI

• Absinthe: World Literature in Translation

  2024-01-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Last Translations:

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2023-08-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Phonetic and Phonological Salience in Tone Processing

  The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique · 2022-03-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The aim of this study is to determine whether it is the phonetic or phonological effect on processing that is stronger when the two effects are in conflict. Results are presented from a recall experiment, in which speakers of French and Tłı̨chǫ (Dene, Canada) recall syllables with either H or L tone. While French speakers remembered H syllables more accurately, Tłı̨chǫ speakers remembered L tones more accurately. The findings show simultaneous effects of phonetics and phonology, and have implications for notions of salience and how it can be measured as well as for the different types of salience that are active in speech sound processing.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1. Humanizing Shylock: The “Jewish Type” in Weimar Film

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg (review)

  AJS Review The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies · 2021-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg Maya Barzilai Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000295 The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the [End Page 473] European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first "incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine" (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers' engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography. In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story "Ana min al-yahoud" (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that "it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic" (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature. One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, "A Spectralized Past" and "Haunted Nation," Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to "recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors," assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the "gothic agunah" as both "excessively present" and "defiant" or resistant through her affect (85). Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the [End Page 474] cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's "Lady of the Castle," interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a "conflicted Zionism," becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua...

  PublisherDOI

• Phonetic & Phonological Salience Effects in Different Speech Processing Tasks

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2021-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper provides evidence for both effects of both phonetic and phonological salience in speech processing. Results from three experiments are presented, each examining the relative processing of two speech sounds by speakers of two different languages. In each experiment, one of the two sounds is more phonetically salient and the other is more phonologically salient given the morphophonological patterning of one of the langauges. Phonetic salience effects emerged in shorter-term tasks and phonological salience effects emerged in tasks that were longer-term and that required more phonological processing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Celebrating 50 years of ACAL

  2021

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Library science

  The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of British Columbia in 2019. The contributions span a range of theoretical topics as well as topics in descriptive and applied linguistics. The papers reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and also represent the breadth of the ACAL community, with papers from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America and beyond. They thus provide a snapshot on current research in African linguistics, from multiple perspectives. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, the volume editors reminisce, in the introductory chapter, about their memorable ACALs.

  Publisher

• Context-dependent phonetic enhancement of a phonation contrast in San Pablo Macuiltianguis Zapotec

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics

  This paper presents novel data from San Pablo Macuiltianguis Zapotec, a Sierra Juárez variety spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. This language is ‘laryngeally complex’ (Silverman, 1997), exhibiting both contrastive tone and contrastive phonation. We examine the acoustic properties of the modal and checked vowels in this language, showing that this contrast is variably produced with several different acoustic cues. We analyze the distribution of these cues as an instance of phonetic enhancement and further show that the prosodic position of a given vowel determines which of several enhancement patterns is used. We argue that extant theories of phonetic enhancement, while able to explain the patterns described here, fall short of predicting the distribution of enhancing cues. We therefore propose that future models of phonetic enhancement could be expanded to predict patterns in which more than one acoustic dimension is available for phonetic enhancement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp.

  AJS Review The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies · 2021-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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Frequent coauthors

• Keffyalew Gebregziabher

  1 shared

• Sharon Rose

  Vellore Institute of Technology University

  1 shared

• Akinbiyi Akinlabi

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  1 shared

• Blake Lehman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• James Essegbey

  University of Florida

  1 shared

• Katherine J. Riestenberg

  Oxford University Press (United Kingdom)

  1 shared

• Esther Oweleke

  1 shared

• Travis Major

  University of Southern California

  1 shared