Galit Hasan-Rokem

{{Infobox person

| honorific_prefix = Professor

| name = Galit Hasan-Rokem

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| image = Galit Hasan Rokem.jpg

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| caption = Galit Hasan-Rokem in 2008

| native_name = גלית חזן־רוקם

| native_name_lang = Hebrew

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| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|df=y|1945|08|29}}

| birth_place = Helsinki, Finland

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| education = Hebrew University of Jerusalem (PhD)

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| employer = Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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| known_for = Paremiology, folklore in Israel

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| spouse = Freddie Rokem

| children = 3

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Galit Hasan-Rokem ({{langx|he|גלית חזן־רוקם}}; born 29 August 1945) is the Max and Margarethe Grunwald professor of folklore at the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author and editor of numerous works, including co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Folklore (2012), her research interests include proverbs, folklore and culture of the Middle East, and folklore genres and narratives. She is also a published poet and translator of poetry, and a Pro-Palestinian activist. The Jerusalem Post has called her "a figure of some prominence in Jerusalem intellectual circles".{{cite web |url= http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-17092319.html|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20160421053612/https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-17092319.html|url-status= dead|archive-date= 21 April 2016|title=Reading from Right to Left|first=Jeff|last=Green|date=4 September 1998|access-date=9 October 2015|work=The Jerusalem Post|url-access=subscription }}

Early life and education

Galit Hasan-Rokem was born in 1945 in Helsinki to Jewish parents who were also natives of Finland.{{cite web |url=http://www.folklore.ee/Folklore/vol30/discuss.pdf|title= Interview with Galit Hasan-Rokem at the 14th Congress of the ISFNR, 31 July 2005, Tartu |first=Ave|last=Tupits|date=31 July 2005|access-date=8 October 2015|publisher=folklore.ee}} She attended the Helsinki Jewish day school from 1952 to 1957.{{cite web|url=https://il.linkedin.com/pub/galit-hasan-rokem/a/440/725 |title=Galit Hasan-Rokem |publisher=LinkedIn |year=2015 |access-date=8 October 2015 }}{{dead link|date=January 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} In 1957, at the age of 12, she immigrated with her family to Israel.{{cite web|url = http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/hasan-rokem-galit|title = Galit Hasan-Rokem|year = 2015|access-date = 7 October 2015|publisher = Jewish Women's Archive}}{{cite web|url=http://members.ngfp.org/Courses/Hasan-Rokem/instructor|title=Online Folklore Course – The Instructor: Professor Galit Hasan-Rokem|publisher=The Nahum Goldmann Fellowship Online|year=2015|access-date=8 October 2015}}{{Dead link|date=November 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}

Following high school graduation, she completed her compulsory military service and enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the late 1960s. After attaining her undergraduate degree, she participated in an exchange program at the University of Finland's Department of Finnish and Comparative Folklore, where she studied under Professors Matti Kuusi and Lauri Honko, solidifying her desire to become a folklorist. She earned her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978, studying under Professor Dov Noy.{{cite book|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=m3qsBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA231|title= Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions|first=Raphael|last=Patai|year=2015|publisher=Routledge|isbn= 978-1317471714|pages=231}} She became a full professor of folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984.

Work

Hasan-Rokem's research interests include proverbs, folklore and culture of the Middle East, and folklore genres and narratives, including folklore in rabbinic literature.{{cite web |url= http://www.folklorefellows.fi/?page_id=656|title=Towards the Nightless Night|date=November 1994|access-date=10 October 2015|publisher=Folklore Fellows}} She has produced several major works studying proverbs in Israel and the proverbs of Georgian Jews in Israel.

Hasan-Rokem displays a "conscious feminism" in her work. Her interdisciplinary approach to folklore, including the feminist aspects of her research, are frequently quoted by other authors.{{citation |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YWlS9iomfAMC&pg=PA49|chapter=Women and Torah Study in Aggadah|first=Dvora E.|last=Weisberg|pages=49–50|title=Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship|editor-first=Frederick E. |editor-last=Greenspahn|year=2009|publisher=NYU Press|isbn=978-0814732182}}{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=r5tYKObWZyUC&pg=PA13|title=Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture|first=Jenny R.|last=Labendz|year=2013|publisher=OUP USA|isbn=978-0199934560|page=13}}{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q3g8IhpQcH8C&pg=PA121|title=Closure in Biblical Narrative|first=Susan|last=Zeelander|year=2011|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-9004218222|page=121}} Books and other works by Hasan-Rokem have been published in more than eight languages.

Other activities

Hasan-Rokem founded the Proverb Indexing Project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Folklore Research Center. She assisted her mentor, Professor Noy, in developing the Hebrew University's Folklore Program into a full undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degree program. She co-founded the annual Israeli Inter-University Folklore Conference in 1981. She is also credited with elevating the recognition of Israeli folklore studies to the international level. She has lectured as a visiting professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, and engages in teaching and research cooperation with scholars in the United States, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Palestinian Authority.

She has been the associate editor of Proverbium, the yearbook of international proverb scholarship, since 1984. She is a regular contributor to the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales, published by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

From 2001 to 2004 she headed the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Poet

{{Quote box

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|quote=ARS POETICA{{efn|The word "ars", which means "art" in Latin, phonetically translates as "pimp" in Hebrew and Arabic slang.}}

Men poets have muses

Wrapping them in soft affection

Calling them with gentle voices, Fondling

And I have you, poetical pimp

Sending me to the street corner

Dressed in light, cheap clothes

Tyrannizing me, selling me

Upon my return, stealing my wages

Hitting me so that I'll know

Driving my heart mad

Making a laughingstock of me

Sometimes offering me the grace of a moment

No man will get this from me.

|source=Galit Hasan-Rokem

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Hasan-Rokem is a published poet and translator of poetry. She has produced three volumes of poetry in Hebrew, some of which has appeared in translation. She translated a selection of Swedish-language poems by Finnish poet Edith Södergran (1892–1923) into Hebrew for her second book of poetry, Voice Training: Poems (1998). In 2013 she translated the complete poems of Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer into Hebrew.{{cite web|url = http://www.haaretz.com/life/arts-leisure/a-victory-for-poetry-1.389270|title = A Victory for Poetry|last = Eliahu|first = Eli|date = 11 October 2011|work = Haaretz|access-date = 7 October 2015}}{{cite web|url=http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/23781/12/Rafi-Weichert|title=Rafi Weichert (Israel, 1964)|publisher=Poetry International Rotterdam|date=22 January 2013|access-date=9 October 2015|archive-date=25 March 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180325165703/http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/23781/12/Rafi-Weichert|url-status=usurped}}

Pro-Palestinian activist

Hasan-Rokem is a founding editor of the Palestine–Israel Journal and a long-time pro-Palestinian activist. She is a strong supporter of the two-state solution and the division of Jerusalem into the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state.{{cite journal |url= http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=627|title= Not the Mother of All Cities: a Feminist Perspective of Jerusalem|journal= Palestine–Israel Journal|volume=2|issue=3|year=1995|last=Hasan-Rokem|first=Galit}}{{cite web |url=http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/07/mideast-marching-in-step-for-peace/|title=MIDEAST: Marching in Step for Peace|first= Pierre |last=Klochendler|date=17 July 2011|access-date=9 October 2015|work=Inter Press Service}} As a visiting scholar at Rutgers University in 2014, she claimed that Israeli street signs exhibit bias against Arabic-speaking residents, since the Hebrew text is more prominent and the Arabic translation is often a phonetic version of the Hebrew.{{cite web |url=http://www.dailytargum.com/article/2014/02/hebrew-university-professor-discusses-israeli-folklore|title= Hebrew University professor discusses Israeli folklore|first=Erin|last=Petenko|date=21 February 2014|access-date=9 October 2015|work=The Daily Targum}}

Memberships

Hasan-Rokem served as president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research from 1998 to 2005. She is a member of the Folklore Fellows international executive committee and advisory board since 1993, and a member of the King Gustav Adolf Academy for Folk Culture in Sweden since 2007. She has been awarded two fellowships from the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in 2003–2004 and 2015–2016.{{cite web|url=https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/fellowship-program/fellow/galit-hasan-rokem|title=Galit Hasan-Rokem|year=2011|access-date=9 October 2015|publisher=Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150915200022/https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/fellowship-program/fellow/galit-hasan-rokem|archive-date=15 September 2015|url-status=dead|df=dmy-all}}

Personal

Hasan-Rokem is married to Freddie Rokem, the Emanuel Herzikowitz Professor for 19th- and 20th-Century Art at Tel Aviv University and a published author in theatre studies.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AiJ-nPWIB8YC&pg=PR8|title=Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature|first=Na'ama|last=Rokem|year=2013|publisher=Northwestern University Press|isbn=978-0810166394|page=viii}}{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-kTSqvRPNPAC&pg=PR12|title=Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance|first=Freddie|last=Rokem|year=2010|publisher=Stanford University Press|isbn=978-0804763509|page=xii}} They have three children. Their son, Amitai, died in a hiking accident in 1990.

She is fluent in Finnish, Hebrew, Swedish, and English.

Selected bibliography

=Books=

{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qhsdhM9tI3EC |title=A Companion to Folklore|year=2012|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn= 978-1405194990}} (co-edited with Regina Bendix)
{{cite book|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=ACaRYfUrsqYC |title= Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity|publisher= University of California Press|year=2003|isbn= 0520928946}}
{{cite book |title=Jewish Women in the Yishuv and Zionism: A Gender Perspective|year=2001|language=he}} English revised edition: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture, Brandeis University Press, 2008 (co-edited with Margalit Shilo and Ruth Kark)
{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hX3ZdLmF7pMC |title= Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature|year=2000|publisher=Stanford University Press|isbn= 0804732272}}
{{cite book|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=TC6fuWNc77UC&pg=PR4 |title= The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology|year=1999|publisher=Feminist Press at CUNY|isbn=1558612246}} (co-edited with Shirley Kaufman and Tamar Hess)
{{cite book|title=The Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Eikha Rabba|language=he|year=1996}}
{{cite book |url= https://archive.org/details/untyingknotonrid0000unse |url-access= registration |title= Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1996|isbn= 0195108566}} (with David Dean Shulman)
{{cite book |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=dqZIAAAAMAAJ |title=Adam le-Adam Gesher: Proverbs of Georgian Jews in Israel|language=he|year=1993|publisher=Machon Ben-Zvi|isbn=9789652350473}}
{{cite book|title=The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend|url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingjewessa00hasa|url-access=registration|publisher=Indiana University Press|year=1986|isbn=978-0-253-36340-4 }} (co-edited with Alan Dundes)
{{cite book |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=4IGBAAAAMAAJ |title=Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A structural semantic analysis|year=1982|publisher= Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia|isbn=9789514104268}}
{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mTLjrQEACAAJ&q=Galit+Hasan-Rokem|title=The Art of Mixing Metaphors: A Folkloristic Interpretation of the Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Issues 230-232|year=1982|publisher=Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia|isbn=9514104242}} (with Alan Dundes, Lee Haring, and Claudia A. Stibbe)

=Poetry=

{{cite book|title=Tsippori: Forty-Minus-One Byzantine Haiku from the Galilee and a Poem|language=he|year=2002|publisher=Am Oved}}
{{cite book|title=Voice Training: Poems|language=he|publisher=Hakibbutz Hameuchad|year=1998}}
{{cite book|title=Like Lot's Wife|language=he|year=1989}}

Notes

References

External links

[http://jewish.huji.ac.il/faculty/folklore_faculty/hasan-rokem.html Faculty page] at Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[https://huji.academia.edu/GalitHasanRokem List of Papers]
[http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=710 "Four Poems"] Palestine–Israel Journal, 1994

Category:1945 births

Category:Living people

Category:Israeli Jews

Category:Israeli poets

Category:Israeli women poets

Category:Israeli folklorists

Category:Israeli women folklorists

Category:Academic staff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Category:Hebrew University of Jerusalem alumni

Category:Writers from Helsinki

Category:Finnish folklorists

Category:Finnish women folklorists