IIJS Book Talk with Naama Harel

Jews, women, and animals have been notoriously considered in Western thought as antithetical to the “civilized,” and therefore parallel. The trope of the womanized Jewish man has been widely recognized as a staple in otherizing portrayals of European Jews, as well as their self-perception. Similarly, ecofeminist critique has addressed the ubiquitous depiction of the animalized woman throughout history. Yet, the interconnection between the effeminization of Jews and the animalization of women has been overlooked. 

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically explores the tangled interplay between Jewishness, gender, and animality and its manifestation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Through interdiscursive analysis and close readings, the effeminate Jew is examined vis-à-vis the animalized woman. Intertwining cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of posthumanism and animal studies with established scholarship of Hebrew literature, Jewish studies, and gender studies, Naama Harel offers new Hebrew literary historiography and innovative perspectives on canonical works by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Devorah Baron, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Yosef Haim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and David Vogel.

Naama Harel directs Columbia’s Hebrew program and co-chairs the University Seminar for Human-Animal Studies. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of Modern Jewish & Hebrew literature and Human-Animal Studies. She is the author of Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human/Animal Barrier (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She has authored books such as Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron Prize for Outstanding First Book in Jewish Studies), and is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include animal studies, Jewish difference, rabbinic legal authority, and Bible reception history.

*Guests must register by Monday, December 1 to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.

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