Nava Semel

Nava Semel was born in 1954 in Jaffa

Nava Semel was born in Jaffa in 1954. Her parents were Yitzhak Artzi, a politician and member of the Knesset, and Mimi, a survivor of Auschwitz. Her older brother is the singer Shlomo Artzi.

She served in Galei Tzahal and was discharged in 1974. She earned an MA in art history from Tel Aviv University.

Semel published 16 books and also wrote plays, poetry, libretti and screenplays, and translated plays into Hebrew. Her story collection Hat of Glass was the first fiction in Israel about children of Holocaust survivors. Her characters are native Israelis facing questions of identity and the scars of the past.

She sat on the boards of Massuah and the New Foundation for Television and Cinema, and served on the board of Yad Vashem from 1993 to 2013. She married Noam Semel in 1976, and they had 3 children. She lived in Tel Aviv and died of cancer in 2017.