Dr. Elya Zissel Piazza (they/them) received their PhD from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies with Designated Emphases in Jewish Studies and Gender and Women's Studies. Their work explores what new insights are gleaned by reading the Talmud, Yiddish literature, and other expressions of Jewish culture through the lenses of queer and trans theory. Elya is currently a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Passionate about creative and liberatory pedagogies, Elya has been a teaching fellow at SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, and a Yiddish language pedagogy fellow as well as a translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Their translation of Di Agune by Maria Lerner, the earliest known Yiddish play by a woman playwright, appears in the volume Three Yiddish Plays by Women from Bloomsbury.
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Elya Zissel Piazza
UC Berkeley
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Review
On Queertaytsh
Elya Zissel Piazza
The established corpus of queer theory can offer even more language and framing for understanding modern Jewish culture while, at the same time, sharpening how the taytsh framework can fill out what it means to read—literature, culture, history—queerly, and Jewishly, if there is a difference between the two.
Jan 08, 2025