Dr. Yarden Ben-Zur

Dr. Yarden Ben-Zur is the Manfred Lahnstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa for 2025–26. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he is pursuing a project on the reception of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in modern Iran, focusing particularly on the works of the modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951). This project demonstrates how Iranian modernist writing developed in close dialogue with, and in affiliation with, German-Jewish literary legacies. The project also extends to contemporary German discourse, focusing on Navid Kermani’s Between Koran and Kafka (b. 1967).

Dr. Ben-Zur is a literary scholar specializing in German Studies and Comparative Literature, with a particular focus on translation, Orientalism, and interreligious and transnational encounters. He completed his dissertation in German Studies and Comparative Literature at the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on modern German literature, with particular emphasis on poetry from the Enlightenment period to the present, in dialogue with Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic literary traditions. He is especially interested in how German writers engaged with what they understood as “Eastern poetics” through acts of translation, adaptation, and negotiation.

He is currently writing his first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, The Rose Garden: Poetic Encounters, World Literature – A Comparative Reading in German, Persian, and Hebrew. The project examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s literary engagement with the garden as a space for the transformation of subjectivity and as a mediator of intercultural encounters. Its central argument is that the emergence of modern subjectivity in German literature around 1800 cannot be separated from this literature’s turn toward the East, particularly toward Hebrew and Persian traditions.

Another project he is working on explores how nineteenth-century German poets such as Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), and August von Platen (1796–1835) adapted Eastern forms such as the ghazal and the Hebrew melody in ways that reflect and shape the dialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly through their engagement with the liturgical traditions of each.

Alongside his academic work, he is also active as a writer and translator. He has translated texts by Goethe, Stefan George, and Else Lasker-Schüler into Hebrew, and has published literary criticism on German literature, as well as original poetry and prose, in leading journals in Israel and Europe. His debut poetry collection, The Suburbs of Blue Sleep (2023), received the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Debut Poetry Books, and his first novel, Bypasses, is forthcoming with Persimmon Books.