Jewish Studies Seminar with Yael Segalovitz: "S/Leap: On Sleep and Leaps of Thought in Hebrew Women’s Writing"

The Yale Jewish Studies Seminar, organized by graduate students, invites junior and mid-career scholars to campus to present their Jewish Studies research in a seminar setting with the university community.  All are warmly invited to attend.

What is sleep beyond its biological function? Western discourse typically frames sleep as a problem to overcome, an obstacle to productivity to be minimized through caffeine and self-discipline. Yet literature, as a site of creative alternatives, urges us to consider “sleeps” in the plural: as escape route, as subversion, as a form of perception that persists in waking hours. This talk examines how sleep is strategically deployed and reimagined in Hebrew literature, a tradition where writers have been historically mythologized as “watchmen unto Israel”: prophets tasked with vigilant awareness, perpetually awake to warn and guide the people, a role particularly intensified in Palestine/Israel’s literary context.

I focus on three women writers—Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Dalia Ravikovitch, and Ronit Matalon—who transform sleep from narrative element into theoretical intervention. In their works, sleep emerges not as passive succumbing but as active engagement with matters of gender, power, and epistemology. These texts manipulate sleep as both a way of knowing and thinking and as a political strategy, challenging the conventional prophetic stance by suggesting that deep perception and resistance may actually emerge through states of reverie or ostensible withdrawal.

The talk places these texts in conversation with psychoanalytic thought, which has recognized sleep’s generative potential since its inception. As Wilfred Bion provocatively proclaimed, “the state of being awake is vastly overrated.” In our current moment, when many of us are overcome by a fierce desire to lay our heads down and sleep through unbearable rage, anxiety, and political despair, these writers offer crucial meditations into what sleep might accomplish precisely through its refusal to be measured in terms of accomplishment.

Yael Segalovitz is the 2025–26 Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley and a Jewish Studies Teaching Fellow at Stanford University. She is also Assistant Professor of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is the author of How Close Reading Made Us (SUNY, 2024), and her current project traces how psychoanalytic object relations theory renews debates about reading practices, subject formation, and self-writing in contemporary American literature and theory.