Zehavit Stern is a researcher of Yiddish theatre and film, and Hebrew and Yiddish literature and folklore. She currently teaches at the Theatre Department at the Hebrew University and at the Tisch School of Film and Television and the Goldreich Institute at Tel Aviv University. In the years 2011–2015 she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford. She holds an MA in Yiddish culture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published and lectured extensively on Eastern European Jewish culture. Among her publications are “The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, and “On Dubbing the Dead: The Dybbuk 1937-1917,” in TDR/The Drama Review (vol. 63:2, 2019). Her forthcoming book, titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Folk Performance: Eastern European Jewish Culture and the Invention of a National Dramatic Heritage examines the emergence of the narrative that views the Purim-shpil and other formerly rejected folkish expressions as the origins of Jewish theatre.