Mikhal Dekel

Mikhal Dekel was born in 1965 in Haifa

Mikhal Dekel was born in 1965 in Haifa to Hannan and Zipora Dekel (Teitel). Her younger brother is the physician, scientist and inventor Benjamin Dekel.

After her military service, she earned a law degree at the Buchmann School of Law at Tel Aviv University. She interned at the Tel Aviv State Attorney's Office and is a member of the Israel Bar Association. She then moved to New York, studied English at the City College of New York and completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Dekel teaches English and Comparative Literature at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She directs the college's Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts. Her research covers migration, historical memoir, trauma and the meeting of law and literature.

Her book The Universal Jew looks at how literature by writers such as Herzl, George Eliot and Bialik related to early Zionism. She also wrote the Hebrew book Oedipus in Kishinev. In 2019 she published Tehran Children, which traces her father's escape as a child refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland.