Mrs. Adi Molad was a PhD. student in the Comparative Literature and Culture Studies at the Tel Aviv University and has submitted her dissertation about “Aerial Spectacles: Circus Poetics in Jewish Modernism” (advisor: Galili Shahar, Dina Berdichevsky).

At the Bucerius Institute, she will work on a comparative project, titled “The Multiplicity of the East: Dervish and Hasidic Ecstatic Dance between Else Lasker-Schüler and S.Y. Agnon.” The meaning of dance, along with its diverse embodiments of the East remain unexplored in scholarship on German-Jewish and Hebrew modernism. This project explores the concept of the “East” as a dynamic multiplicity, an unfixed structure of affinities, relations, and transformations, embodied through the choreography of ecstatic bodies in Else Lasker-Schüler’s collection of tales Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The Nights of Tino of Bagdad) from 1907 and S.Y. Agnon’s story “Aggadat Ha-Sofer” (The Tale of the Author) from 1919.

The project investigates how ecstatic dance functions as a literary device through which early twentieth-century Jewish writers reimagine the “East” as a dynamic spatial and bodily multiplicity rather than a fixed geographic or cultural category. In this comparative literature project, She argues that circular ecstatic movement – Dervish and Hasidic dance – produces an embodied poetics of space that deterritorializes both Orientalist discourse and the modern Western idea of rationalism.