Chana Kronfeld
Professor of Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley

Born and raised in Israel in 1949, Chana Kronfeld studied Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University before completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley in 1983. After teaching at Cornell, she returned to UC Berkeley, wehre she has been teaching ever since, with a joint appointment in Near Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature and the Center for Jewish Studies. Her areas of specialization include Modernism in Hebrew, Yiddish and English poetry, intertextuality, translation studies, theory of metaphor, literary historiography, stylistics and ideology, gender studies, political poetry, marginality and minor literatures, literature & linguistics, negotiating theory and close reading.

She is currently working on a book-length study titled: The Land as Woman: The Afterlife of a Poetic Metaphor in Women’s Modern Hebrew Poetry

 

Selected Publications

On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (UC Press, 1996)

Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai, co-translation with Chana Bloch z”l (Harcourt, 2000)

Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, annotated co-translation and introduction, with Chana Bloch z”l (Norton, 2009)

“Murdered Modernisms: Peretz Markish and the Legacy of Soviet Yiddish Poetry,” in Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, David Shneer and Jordan Finkin, eds., Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952), Oxford: Legenda, 2011, pp. 182-202

The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford UP, 2016)

“The Joint Literary Historiography of Hebrew and Yiddish,” in Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, Joshua L.Miller and Anita Norich, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016, pp.15-35.