Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive at the UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Organizer: UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Date and Time: Tuesday, October 6 @ 5:00-6:30pm

Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus

In her new book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive, Na’ama Rokem investigates written exchanges by a range of literary twentieth century authors, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul Celan, and Tuvia Ruebner. This remarkable bilingual archive encompasses not only letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemeral documents. Written in German and Hebrew, these documents were sent to and from Jerusalem, primarily in the decades following 1948.

The writers at the center of Rokem’s study contend with the genocidal violence that brought the rich historical relation between German and Hebrew to a seeming end. They also grapple, in different ways, with the new reality in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. The bilingual conversation that crosses over between German and Hebrew in these letters thus centers around the question of Jewish fate in the twentieth century and is immersed in negotiations about Jewish nationalism, the Zionist movement, and the possibilities of Jewish poetry. In the space between German and Hebrew, Rokem argues, the protagonists of her study articulate forms of ambivalence and doubt that remain absent from their published writings.

In this book presentation, Rokem will discuss forms of belonging and resistance that emerged in relation to the Zionist movement throughout the twentieth century, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of Jewish nationalism and its discontents.

Na’ama Rokem teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she has served as director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is her second book. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2013. It uses the case of the reception and translation of the works of German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine to argue that prose – as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium – played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. Currently, she is working as one of the co-editors of the forthcoming Volume IV.2 of the Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Hannah Arendt (Essays and Short Writings on Jewish Politics) and starting a new research project on Zionism and pedagogy.

Rokem has been involved in a number of collaborative projects, including The Quest for Modern Language: Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and Translation Networks and the Stakes of Comparison: Convergences and Crossings Between Arabic and Hebrew, both sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium on Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, and the Oak Woods Cemetery project, a public history initiative that uses a historic cemetery in Woodlawn as a site for teaching, programming, and researching the history of the South Side of Chicago, with a particular interest in the complexly intertwined histories of African Americans and Jews in the city. This project has received funding from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Women’s Board at the University of Chicago.