I work on ancient Greek literature and literary criticism, as well as the reception of Hellenism in early Islam. I received a BA from the Hebrew University and a PhD from Princeton, before joining the department of classics at Tel Aviv University in 2020. I am currently working to complete a manuscript devoted to the questions of why the Greeks began writing prose, and how it later became “prosaic”. I recently wrote about the language of the earliest alphabetic Greek writing.
At the other end of antiquity I have published on Greco-Arabic textual criticism, but have also argued for a broader and more diverse engagement of early Islamic civilization with Hellenism, one not limited to the translation of Greek philosophy and science but also extending to belles lettres literature. As part of this effort I have made the case that Imruʾ al-Qays and Sībawayhi, the founders of classical Arabic poetry and grammar, respectively, died as Greek mythological heroes.
More importantly, I wrote A Pile of Pals on the Grass (Carmel, 2022, in Hebrew), about a year I spent living as the only Jew in the Galilean town of Sakhnin and about its football team, the lone Arab team in the top Israeli division (Haaretz: "certainly not an academic book").
