The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) welcomed Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Oren Yirmiya in September 2025, marking an exciting addition to the Department’s growing community of scholars. Professor Yirmiya brings a rich interdisciplinary background to NMC, having earned his BA and MA in comparative literature from Tel Aviv University before completing his PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2024. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he served as a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2024–2025).
Cross-appointed with the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies (ATCJS), Professor Yirmiya specializes in modern Hebrew literature with a particular focus on Mizrahi perspectives, as well as poetry from the 19th century to the present day. In this interview, he reflects on his scholarly journey, his dedication to expanding Hebrew literature, and his vision for teaching and research within NMC and the broader university community.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your academic background and what inspired you to pursue your field of study or career path?
From a very young age, I loved books: the ragged texture of a printed page, the smell of old ink on yellowing paper, the way a sentence catches you mid-read with an unexpected sensory description, abruptly planting images and senses into your mind. Growing older and learning about the myriad ways Hebrew literature shaped Jewish history and politics, I also fell in love with researching how society feeds into prose and poetry, and how those two feed back into society itself, changing how and for what goals people can get together to change the world for the better (or at least try doing so). This eventually led me to my PhD work at UC Berkeley under the guidance of Chana Kronfeld, where I learned to be both a devoted close reader of literature and to maintain my political commitments, researching these two spheres in tandem.
Q: What drew you to join the University of Toronto and NMC?
The NMC department here in Toronto does a beautiful job of encouraging both scholars and students to think about the long history of their literatures, whether in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and more, and to consider them cross-culturally within the MENA region and beyond. I first felt welcome in the department during my campus visit, as one of the social conversations turned into a comparative discussion of prosody, that is, questions of rhyme and meter, across our different corpora. This type of deep dive into literary history and forms is hard to find, and I feel very fortunate to be in a place where it is still possible!
Q: What advice would you give to students interested in your field?
For those students seeking to learn more about Hebrew literature, I would recommend two things: read from the margins to the center and read from the present to the past. It is so easy to read only the canon of modern poets and novelists of the last 140 years, starting with the likes of Bialik and Brenner and going down the (mostly male, mostly European Ashkenazi) line. And it is easy, in part, because those texts are beautiful. But because of their canonicity, these texts also fall more readily into pre-existing, unexciting reading protocols. If you are looking for the new, for the interesting, for the life-changing, seek out and read the less canonized writers like Jiri Langer, Yitzhak Shemi, Rahel the Poetess, Erez Biton, Viki Shiran, Shimon Adaf, and others. Also, go to the past: read the piyyut (liturgical Hebrew poetry) of Byzantine Palestine, of the 16th-century paytan Rabbi Yisrael Najaara, or that of 18th-century Tunisia and Morocco piyyut schools. Go all the way back to the Hebrew Bible! You'll be surprised how thought-provoking and sensual they can be! And if you don't know where to start, well, come join one of the classes I am teaching next year, and especially the upcoming 200-level class "The Birds and the Deer: Hebrew Poetry from the Bible to Modernity."
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| (Image Courtesy of Oren Yirmiya: I shall praise manuscript (the Cambridge University Library Genizah Collection) |
Q: What are you currently working on or planning to explore next?
I currently have several irons in the fire. The first and biggest project I am conducting is my book manuscript "The Other('s) Lyric: Piyyut, Identity, and Alterity in Modern Hebrew Mizrahi Poetry." In it, I examine how piyyut, liturgical Hebrew poetry, was constitutive of global lyric poetry during the Middle Ages; how these same liturgical forms were marginalized during the Zionist nation-building project at the turn of the twentieth century; and finally, how these suppressed poetic traditions resurfaced during the last sixty years in the work of Mizrahi poets, that is, writers with origins in the Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world.
I am also working on two articles: one on the intersection of gender non-binary and Mizrahi Jewish identities as it manifests in a 2017 science fiction novel by Shimon Adaf, in which he also invents a speculative, futuristic post-gender dialect of Hebrew. Another is an article that reads one of Franz Kafka's short stories, compares it to a Talmudic passage, and tries to reconceptualize a post-secular notion of the "crisis of tradition" in 20th-century Jewish thought by showing how similar feelings about the end of tradition have persisted since at least late antiquity. I am also working with the esteemed Professor Iris Rachamimov to co-edit a volume of articles on trans history and culture in Israel.
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| (Image Courtesy of Oren Yirmiya: Sami Shalom Shetrit essay) |
Q: What do you enjoy doing outside of work? (What's something you're passionate about that might surprise people?)
Being a professor is no excuse to stop enjoying contemporary culture, and when I'm not researching or doing teaching prep, there are several interests I can't do without. First and foremost is pop music. As a perpetual fan of pop divas and indie rock, I try to keep up with new releases, including, for example, the last two 10-out-of-10 albums I listened to, which are LUX by Rosalía (that also has some Hebrew lyrics in it!) and Getting Killed by Geese. I am also a huge nerd for sci-fi and fantasy novels and American superhero comic books, and cannot wait for the next N.K. Jemisin book or Grant Morrison miniseries.
Q: What kind of impact do you hope to make within the Department or student community?
More than anything, I hope to make the Department a place where my subject of study, Hebrew literature, is deeply critiqued and reframed, but also enjoyed and celebrated. This is not an easy task for Hebrew prose and poetry, which over the last century or so have been circulated within very specific political contexts, often siloed from the general readership. I think many students might feel that reading Hebrew is a conscripted activity. However, I hope to reopen the category, in my research and teaching, showing its many connections to other literatures, namely in Arabic, Yiddish, and Persian, and the diversity of political and aesthetic commitments writers in Hebrew have taken over the years, from the diasporic to the communist, the liberal, the fascist, the religiously traditional, and beyond. In this moment, when the role and political meaning of Hebrew are being reappraised globally, there is no greater task for me than being part of this change, doing my part to make it a change for the better.