Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi was born in 1942 in Washington, D.C.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. Her mother Janet was a social worker born in Ostrowiec, Poland, and her father Herman was a lawyer born in Chicago.

She began her studies at Wellesley College and finished a bachelor's degree in English and Political Science at the Hebrew University in 1966. She then earned an M.A. in 1968 and a PhD in 1976 in English and American literature at Brandeis University.

In 1978 she became head of the literature section at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. She joined its Department of General and Comparative Literature in 2008 and retired as Full Professor in 2011. She was a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Dartmouth, Toronto and other universities.

Her research has dealt with Holocaust representation in literature, exile and return in Jewish writing, and Jerusalem in Israeli literature. Her book By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature appeared in 1980. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for a project on Jerusalem.

She is a peace activist and helped start a dialogue group with residents of Beit Sahour during the First Intifada. She is married to writer Bernard Avishai, and they live in Jerusalem and New Hampshire.