Nili Gold is Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.
She published her fourth book, To Walk the Inner Streets, a Hebrew collection of articles on Yoel Hoffmann (coauthored with Yigal Schwartz), in 2024.
Her third book, Haifa: City of Steps (University Press of New England) appeared in the fall of 2017 and Haifa My Love, an original Hebrew version of the book in late 2018. It weaves together the architecture, cultural history, and literature of Haifa. In 2019, she lectured internationally on this book and in the spring of that year, taught a course on the city and led her class through Haifa as part of Penn’s Global Seminar program.
Her book Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet (UPNE, 2008), which is her second book on the poet, appeared in Hebrew translation in 2019 and a new translation into Chinese is now forthcoming. Her first book on Amichai, Not Like a Cypress, appeared in Hebrew in 1994 (Schocken).
Professor Gold was the cofounder, in 2010, of the Middle East Film Festival at Penn and continues to serve on its committee. In 2023, Gold was among the founding members of a nonprofit organization dedicated to the legacy of the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld. She has published extensively on authors including Lea Goldberg, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Yehudit Katzir, and Benjamin Shvili. She has several recent publications (in Hebrew and in English), including, in the summer of 2024, an article in Jewish Quarterly Review presenting new biographical findings on Amichai.
Penn Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations