Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Organization Logo Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Faculty Fellow

Na'ama Rokem

Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Na’ama Rokem works on modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature and on the cultural history of Zionism. Her book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive, is being published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2026. She is currently co-editing a volume of short writing on Jewish politics for the critical edition of the complete works of Hannah Arendt and a selection of the correspondence between Ludwig Strauss, Leah Goldberg, and Tuvia Ruebner. Her new research project focuses on Hebrew language pedagogy as a site of contention and ambivalence about Zionism.

nrokem@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Skyward-facing detail of a metal sculpture made of letters from various alphabets

Translation Networks and the Stakes of Comparison: Convergences and Crossings Between Arabic and Hebrew

Project Team:

Project Topics:

2025 – 2026
Learn More

Projects

The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948

Detail of a 19th century map of the Middle East

The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948

Historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists will come together to examine the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, ...

Project Team:

Project Topics:

Learn More