Uri Cohen specializes in Modern Hebrew Literature and Israeli culture. He wrote his dissertation at the Hebrew University on senses of death between the world wars in Italy and Palestine. His work is grounded in Modern Hebrew culture and literature and questions the evolution and role of poetic language in political discourse, cultural representation of conflict, war, and emotion. Recently his work has dealt with questions of Israeli visual representations, the history of Israeli cinema, and visual arts. In Italian literature the complex figure of Primo Levi is the subject of various reflections.
Uri is the author of a novel ‘Resting in Peace’, which appeared in Israel in 2003 and has authored a documentary film on Israeli writer Ida Fink (Jerusalem festival 2004). He has written literary criticism for the Israeli radio, Yediot Aharonot, Haaretz, and the magazine Erez Acheret. He has published on variety of topics that range from the prose of Primo Levi (Alpaim 25) to the figurative use of animals in Zionist discourse (Jerusalem Studies 19) Agnon’s Modernity (Modernism/Modernity), and the concepts of grief and death in Hebrew letters and culture. (Peace and War in Jewish Culture)
His teaching at Columbia includes Literature Humanities in the undergraduate core curriculum, courses on Israel’s various posts (modernism, Zionism, colonialism) and on Israeli culture from a variety of perspectives; seminars on the ethics of nation building, senses of death and Holocaust representation, representations of love and war, and Israeli cinema. His book Survival: Senses of Death between the World Wars in Palestine and Italy appeared in Hebrew in 2006 (Resling). He has edited the translation of Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (Resling 2008) and essays by Pasolini into Hebrew (Resling 2009). A book on Orly Castel Bloom’s prose and Israeli Postmodernity is scheduled to appear in Hebrew. He is currently working on the Israeli culture of war (In Love and War) and various projects concerning the significance of Primo Levi.
Awards
Brandwine Award
Wolf Foundation Award
Abraham Harman Award for outstanding Ph.D. Students
Romollo Deoto Award
