Publications:
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, Religiosity, transgression and the critique of secularism: Pinchas Sadeh, Yona Wallach, and Zelda Schneerson (accepted to Magnes Press)
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, “On the Theology of (Unfulfilled) Incest in the Story ‘Sister’ by Agnon,” Prooftexts (forthcoming).
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, “‘And Whatever Corner You Turn It’s Either Garbage and Dirt or a Beard and Sidelocks’: On the “Dirty Jew” and Garbage in Agnon’s Work,” Shofar (forthcoming).
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, “Anthropocene, Literature and Aesthetics of Garbage,” Theory and Criticism 57 (2023) (Hebrew,).
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, ‘”I Was a Complete Medium’: Revelation in the Flesh and Automatic Writing in Yona Wallach’s Later Poetics,” in Shira Stav and Dana Olmert (eds.), Yona Wallach (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2023) (Hebrew).
Tafat Hacohen-Bick, “Ecocriticism, Theology, and the Environment in Haviva Pedaya’s The Eye of the Cat,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 26:1-2 (2021).
Dr. Tafat Hacohen Bick
I am a scholar of modern Hebrew literature. I completed my PhD on the subject of theology and poetics in the poetry of Pinchas Sadeh, Yona Wallach, and Zelda Schneerson at the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2020. In 2022-2023, I was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2023-24 I was a visiting scholar at New York University and CUNY Graduate School. I have taught literature in various institutions, including New York University and Ben-Gurion University.
My research focuses on the intersection between religion and literature. While in my Ph.D. I focused on the intellectual connections between aesthetic movements and religious ideas in the writing of central Israeli poets, in my current research I go back to the formative moments of modern Hebrew literature, and to the birth of Jewish secularism. My current research addresses two sides of the same coin: the desire to sin from one hand; and the emotion of fear of sin – Yira’h, on the other hand. I do this by reading early modern Hebrew literature together with Musar literature.
I also wrote on ecology and literature, and I published three articles which particularly focused on the role of filth and garbage in modern Hebrew literature.