Dr. Yael Sela

Yael Sela (DPhil Oxford 2010) is the Lilli und Michael Sommerfreund Guest Professor for Jewish Cultures and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Department of Jewish Studies and Buber-Rosenzweig Institute at Goethe University Frankfurt. 

Her research focuses on German Jewish cultural and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century at intersections of aesthetics, Bible translation, politics, and theology. She has published articles and books on different topics, including Moses Mendelssohn, his reception in contemporaneous scholarship, and the role of aesthetics, translation, and poetry in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Her recent monograph, The People of the Song: Biblical Poetry, Translation, and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlin Haskalah (Leiden and Boston, 2025) explores Mendelssohn’s Psalms and translation and the emergence of Jewish diasporic national consciousness. She is currently researching the place of biblical poetry in modern German Jewish historical consciousness and historiography.

Yael Sela has previously served as an Assistant Professor at the Open University of Israel, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Frankel Institute, University of Michigan, and as a research fellow at several research institutes, including the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

At the HfJS, she offers undergraduate as well as graduate courses in German Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the mythology of Exile, and general modern Jewish history.