Dear Students
The Department of Hebrew Language staff greet you in learning fruitful, interesting and pleasant.
Here are our office hours faculty members. Each of us is available at and in the stated and you are welcome to contact us with any question or problem.
Recommended to schedule the meeting via email.
The Department of Hebrew Language staff greet you in learning fruitful, interesting and pleasant.
Here are our office hours faculty members. Each of us is available at and in the stated and you are welcome to contact us with any question or problem.
Recommended to schedule the meeting via email.
Academic staff
Dr. Ohad Cohen- Dep. Head
Senior Academic Staff - Senior Lecturer
04-8288189
Biblical Hebrew, DSS Hebrew, BiblicalAramaic, Targumic Aramaic, Comparative Semitic, Syntax, Verbal Tense system, Biblical Poetry, Enlightement Hebrew
Prof. Aharon Geva Kleinberger
Senior Academic Staff - Full Professor
Intrest Field: Semitic Languages and Arabic Dialectology.I am a full professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. I completed my doctoral studies at the University of Erlangen in Germany with a specialization in Semitic Philology, Islam and Assyriology.In my research, I focus on contemporary study of Arabic dialects, as well as contemporary Jewish-Arab dialects. Another area of my research is the study of Semitic languages. I have done fieldwork in various places in Israel and around the world. My favorite field is etymology. My research is not merely linguistic. It is multidisciplinary and focuses on various fields: botany, geology, history, cartography, folklore and more.
Prof. Yael Maschler
Senior Academic Staff - Full Professor
04-8249965
Interactional linguistics; discourse and conversation analysis; syntax of spoken Hebrew; sociolinguistics; bilingual discourse; grammaticization; emergent constructions; discourse markers; self-repair; stance-takingWebsite : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yael_Maschler
Prof. Tamar Zewi
Senior Academic Staff - Full Professor
04-8249965
Research interests: Hebrew and Semitic linguistics (especially syntax); Biblical Hebrew and other Hebrew periods; Classical and Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic; Geez; Akkadian of El-Amarna; Ugaritic; Bible translations into Semitic languages; Saadya Gaon's Bible Translation
Dr. Dalit Assouline
Senior Academic Staff - Senior Lecturer
04-8288189
Research interests: language contact, historical linguistics, language attitudes and ideologies, Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, Haredi Yiddish
Dr. Sol Azuelos-Atias
Senior Academic Staff - Senior Lecturer
04-8240192
Pragmatics; Discourse Analysis; Lexical Pragmatics; Referential Semantics; Argumentation; Inferential Pragmatics and Legal Discourse, including: Relevance Theory and in particular its comprehension procedure as a tool of interpretation usable in studies of human verbal communication, Legal Interpretation, Israeli Criminal Legal Discourse and Legal Hebrew.
https://haifa.academia.edu/SolAzuelosAtias
Dr. Ivri Bunis
Senior Academic Staff - Lecturer
I wrote my PhD. thesis on the morphosyntax of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic from the Byzantine Period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Prof. Steven Fassberg (2018). I have written on the historical grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, especially of its Western branch. My research thus far has dealt with historical developments in the use of the definite article, demonstrative pronouns and verbal paradigms, on the historical syntax of complementation, and on verbal hendiadys among other topics. My research interests include the comparative and historical morphosyntax of Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, and I also have a great interest in Spoken Arabic, and how it has interacted with the Neo-Aramaic of the Qalamun mountain range in Syria (i.e., Western Neo-Aramaic).
Emeriti and Retired
Prof. Yitzhak Avishur
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: Hebrew and ancient Semitic languages (Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic); the rhetoric in the Bible; the new Judeo-Arabic: language and Literature in the east
Prof. Moshe Azar OBM
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew: syntax, semantics and discourse analysis; analysis of Hebrew argumentative discourse; interpretation of ambiguous legal texts in Hebrew
Prof. Moshe Azar OBM
Prof. Yosef Chetrit
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: general linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, poetics, north-African Judeo-Arabic dialects, Hebrew component in Jewish languages, north-African Jewish culture
Prof. Aharon Dolgopolsky OBM
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: Semitic and comparative
Prof. Aharon Dolgopolsky OBM
Prof. Ilan Eldar
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: medieval grammatical thought; medieval grammatical literature; the revival of the Hebrew language; language planning
Prof. Michal Ornan-Ephratt
Emerita - Full Professor
04-8240190
Research interests: silence - its forms and meanings; linguistic models in non-linguistic disciplines; psychoanalysis; trade-marks;Iconicity in morphology and semantics;proper names.
Michal Ephratt is a professor of linguistics at the University of Haifa Israel. Her research interests include neologisms, transparency theories and pragmatics, as well as language and life: linguistic models in the psychoanalytic theory and practice. Her major research focus is on the study of silence as means of communication.
She is the editor of Silences – Silence in Culture and in Interpersonal Relations, Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2007 [in Hebrew]; Author of When Silence speaks – Silence as a Verbal Means of Expression, Jerusalem Magness Press, 2014 [in Hebrew]. And journal papers such as "The functions of silence", Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 40(11), 2008, pp. 1909-1938; "Linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic speech and silence", Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 43, 2011, pp. 2286-2307; and "We Try Harder" – Silence and Grice's Cooperative Principle, Maxims and implicatures", Language and Communication, Vol. 32, 2012, pp. 62-79; "The Minute-of-Silence as Solidarity and Individuation: A Conceptual Model of an Israeli Ritual", Journal of Ritual Studies, Vol. 29(1), 2015, pp. 1-20; "Verbal Silence as Figure: Its contribution to linguistic theory", Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, Vol. 52(1), 2016,pp. 511-549 and "Grice's Cooperative Principle in the Psychoanalytic Setting", The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 101(6), 2014, pp. 815-845.
Curriculum Vitae
Prof. Jacob Mansour OBM
Emeritus - Full Professor
Research interests: Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic
Dr. Jacob Gruntfest OBM
Senior Lecturer
Research interests: Semitic languages
Dr. Arye Pilovsky
Senior Lecturer
Research interests: bilingual authors (Hebrew-Yiddish); Hebrew-Yiddish inter-connections in compositions of bilingual authors; Yiddish lexicography; Hebrew-Aramaic component in Yiddish
Prof. Irit Meir OBM
Senior Academic Staff - Associate Professor
Research interests: Modern Hebrew morphology and syntax, diachronic language change, sign languages linguistics
Research Fellows
Dr. Anna Inbar
Research Fellow
Prof. Yaron Matras
Research Fellow
My research interests are contact linguistics, urban multilingualism, language typology, dialectology, language documentation, language policy and forensic linguistics (in particular language analysis for the determination of origin). My main language specialisms are Romani, languages of the Middle East (in particular Kurdish, Arabic, Domari and Turkish) and German dialects, as well as so-called ‘Sonderprachen’ (special languages or in-group vocabularies of peripatetic populations).
I have led large-scale research projects on the dialects of Romani, Kurdish, and Arabic and on Mixed Languages, linguistic areas, and urban multilingualism, with grants from a variety of UK-based and European research councils and foundations. I was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester until 2020, and have held honorary and guest positions at the universities of Sorbonne, Cambridge, La Trobe, Berlin-Humboldt, Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Hanse Institute for Advanced Studies, and others. In 2017 I was awarded a British Academy Wolfson Professorial Fellowship to study policy and practice around urban multilingualism. I studied General Linguistics and Arabic at the Hebrew University, and Comparative and German Linguistics at the universities of Tübingen and Hamburg, completing my MA thesis on Kurdish and my PhD on a pragmatic-functional and typological analysis of Romani.
Dr. Sonya Yampolskaya
Research Fellow
Sonya Yampolskaya is a Doctor of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Her research interests are focused on the following topics: Multilingualism, Diglossia, minority and endangered languages, language shift and variation, language revival and vernacularisation, linguistic politeness and address forms. The areas of her expertise are Hebrew language (especially Ashkenazic Hebrew of various historical periods) and Yiddish (in particular contemporary Hasidic Yiddish).She completed her BA (2004), MA (2006), and PhD (2017) in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at St Petersburg State University. She has also completed her second MA (2010) and PhD programme (2013) in sociolinguistics in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Sociolinguistics at the European University of St Petersburg.Currently, she is a post doc researcher at the University of Haifa (Department of Hebrew Language) and a Research Associate at University College London (Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies).https://ucl.academia.edu/SonyaYampolskaya