Ruth Tsoffar

Associate Professor in the Programs of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature Adjunct Associate in the Department of Anthropology Faculty Associate in the Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Japanese Studies University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1993, Near Eastern Studies Department) University of California, Berkeley (M.A. 1985, Department of Anthropology, Folklore) Haifa University (B.A. 1981, Hebrew Literature and Language)

Contact Information:
1122 Lane Hall
204 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290
734.936.5766
Email: rtsoffar@umich.edu

Scholarly Interests: Feminism, sexuality and gender in multicultural society; Colonialism, ethnicity, and nationalism, poetry and poetics, Hebrew culture and literature, the politics of writing, reading, and culture in Israel and the Middle East, Biblical narrative, ethnography and folklore.

Biography: Ruth Tsoffar is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature, and an Adjunct in the Department of Anthropology. She specializes in interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to literatures and cultures of Israeli and Jewish Culture, focusing on multicultural feminism, and noncanonical writers. Her teaching emphasizes the social and political role of writing and reading in the construction of collective and subjective consciousness. She is the author of The Stains of Culture: an Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her recent article, “’A Land that Devours its People:’ Mizrahi Writing from the Gut,” (Body & Society, 2006) is part of her current research which explores responses to national ideology by women, Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry, and Palestinians, entitled, Cannibal Ideology: Sexuality, Ethnicity and Colonialism in Hebrew Cultures (advance contract, University of California Press).

Publications:

The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women, Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, Wayne State University Press,  2006.

“Staging Sexuality: Reading Wallach's Poetry," Hebrew Studies, Vol. 43, 2002: 87-117.

“A Land that Devours its People:’ Mizrahi Writing from the Gut,” Body & Society, Vol. 12, No. 2, 25-55 (2006)

“Baghdad-Tel Aviv: Roundtrip to the Promised Land,” Social Thought and Commentary Section, Anthropological Quarterly 79:1 (Winter 2006): 133-144.