Sarah Yona
Zweig

Sarah Yona Zweig is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Witztum and Dr. Naphtali Meshel.

Her research focuses on the Moses episode in Sūrat al-Kahf 18:60–82 and its literary background in Late Antiquity.

Sarah traces the narrative predecessors of Moses’ journey to sources as diverse as the Gilgamesh Epos, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. By reading the classic Islamic commentaries as polytexts, she demonstrates their interplay with the many archives of Late Antiquity. Her research thus portrays the traditional exegetes as sensitive readers with their own modes of critical thought and philological practices. Sarah believes that motifs are instruments of transformation and that the world is comprised of stories and not of atoms.

Sarah grew up in Germany where she was a horse acrobat before making aliya to Israel. She obtained her BA in Greek philosophy and MA in comparative religion at the Hebrew University and also studied at both the Sorbonne in Paris and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Driven by a strong sense of social justice and a desire to explore visual parallels of emotional states, Sarah worked as a filmmaker in cinema and journalism for over a decade. She has lived, volunteered, and reported from India, China, Mongolia, Russia, the Syrian border, refugee camps in Germany, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and, most recently, the Ukrainian border. She was a fellow in the residence program at the Doha Institute for Advanced Studies in Doha, Qatar and a research fellow at the India International Centre in New Delhi. In her free time, Sarah likes to stand on her hands, play the oud disharmoniously, make furniture out of discarded wood, and explore hidden places.