Dr. Netta Schramm

I am a scholar of modern and contemporary Jewish Thought and Culture interested in the intersections of textual analysis and performance theory. I focus on ways in which Jewish intellectual and theopolitical production is mediated by sound and video technology.

My doctoral dissertation, "Sound Beliefs: A Performative Approach to the Study of Y. Leibowitz, O. Yosef, and I. Greenberg," shows that attention to oral performances—sermons, lectures, interviews—reveals intellectual dimensions invisible in print. My theoretical framework draws on narratology and performance theory to analyze audio-visual texts as primary sources. I have recently completed a monograph titled Icon and Iconoclast: The Intellectual Biography of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, which is under contract with Princeton University Press. The book argues that close reading of Leibowitz's work—written and performed—is essential for understanding both past and present trends in Israeli political and religious discourse.

As a Polonsky fellow, I will develop a book project on Jewish encounters with sound technology. This projects extends my scholarly trajectory from performed sound to sound technology in the framework of media archaeology, sound studies and religion. Where the dissertation asked how Jewish thinkers communicate through oral performance, the new project asks how Jewish thinkers and communities theorized the very possibility of capturing and reproducing voice. The phonograph posed questions for a tradition centered on the living voice of Torah transmission and was used to imagine the human-divine relationship. Questions debated in halakhic responsa, explored in sermons, and satirized in the Yiddish press constitute a rich and largely unexamined archive.

Publications

Netta Schramm, “Israel and the Israeli Supreme Court: A Comparison of Sermons by R. Ovadia Yosef and His Offspring,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2026): 245–71, https://doi.org/10.1163/1477285x-12341386

Netta Schramm, “Don’t Trouble God with Condolences: On Leibowitz’s Silence Regarding the Holocaust,” Chidushim - Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 21 (2025): 45–76 [Hebrew]

Netta Schramm, “A Radicalization of Haredi Fatalist Theology: Rabbi E.M.M. Shach’s Public Addresses, 1988–1991,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 24, nos. 3–4 (2025): 779–802, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2025.2546593

Netta Schramm, “Oral Torah: A Poetic-Performative Reading of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Ovadia Yosef,” Theory and Criticism 61 (2025): 157–88, https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.61.2025.157188 [Hebrew]

Netta Schramm, “Iconoclast as Icon: On Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s Legacy,” Israel Studies 29, no. 3 (2024): 81–103, https://doi.org/10.2979/is.00028

Netta Schramm, “A Dialogue of Difference: Y. Leibowitz in Conversation with M. Dubois on Judaism and Christianity,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 59, no. 1 (2024): 54–67.

Netta Schramm, “Was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef a Protofeminist? A Look at His Oral Sermons,” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal 20, no. 1 (2023): 1, https://doi.org/10.33137/wij.v20i1.43959

Netta Schramm, “Are You My Rabbi? Yitz Greenberg’s Intellectual Biography in Kuhnian Terms,” Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience 43, no. 3 (2023): 318–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjad010

Efrat Urbach and Netta Schramm, “On Waters’s Miriam and Youssef,” Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal 8, no. 2 (2020): 293–302, https://doi.org/10.1353/jfn.2020.0020.

Netta Schramm, “Radical Translation as Transvaluation From Tsene-Rene to The Jews Are Coming Three Readings of Korah's Rebellion,” PaRDeS 25 (2019): 73–87

Netta Schramm, “Secular Zionist Revision of ‘Tsene U’r’ene’: Reading David Cohen’s Homilies,” Muza 1 (2017): 56–73 [Hebrew]