Dr. Emily Budick

Professional Background

Dr. Emily Budick is Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in American Literature and Chair of the Program of American Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. She received her PhD as well as her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English and American literature from Cornell University. During her Phyllis Greenberg Heideman and Richard D. Heideman Fellowship, she conducted research for her project “Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Holocaust Fiction.”

Dr. Budick is the author of several books, including Psychotherapy and the Everyday Life: A Guide for the Perplexed Consumer with Rami Aronzon, MD (2008); Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust (2004); Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (1998); Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition (1994); and Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition (1989). She is also editor of Modern Hebrew Fiction written by Gershon Shaked and translated by Yael Lotan (2000) and Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature (2001).

Dr. Budick has published numerous articles about persons and topics important to Jewish and American literature, including Philip Roth, Rebecca Goldstein, Emily Dickinson, Holocaust fiction, and Romance literature, and has presented her work at universities and conferences in the United States, Israel, Europe, and Asia. She is the recipient of a research grant from the Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a fellow at both the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies and the Kennedy Institute for American Studies in Berlin, Germany. She has language skills in Hebrew, French, and Latin.

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Center, Dr. Budick researched how Holocaust fictions function as virtual minds in grappling with the events of World War II. She made use of psychoanalytic and neuropsychoanalytic concepts to show how a range of fictional works about the Holocaust construct a subjectivity that calls into question not only the motivations and actions of the characters in the text but also, and more importantly, of the reader. In order to complete her analysis, she used a broad selection of Holocaust novels and short stories written in several countries.

Dr. Budick was in residence at the Mandel Center from February 1 to September 30, 2012.