Nili Rachel Scharf Gold is a professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Israel and educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she received her masters and doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Formerly a professor at Columbia University, she joined the faculty at Penn in 2000. She has authored three books. Not Like a Cypress (1994) was published in Hebrew, and her two English books, Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet (2008) and Haifa: City of Steps (2017), both were subsequently published in Hebrew. Dr. Gold has published dozens of articles in American, European, and Israeli academic journals, as well as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.