Yael Levi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and teaches in the Yiddish Program. Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of Yiddish speakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish immigration, the Yiddish press, and modern Yiddish literature. Her research integrates history, literature, and the study of emotions.

Alongside her research, she translates Yiddish poetry into Hebrew. Her first book, The Spirit that Materials Bear (Eyruvin, 2022), is a bilingual collection of the Yiddish poetry of Devorah Fogel (1900-1942). Her second book, From the Cellar to the Top Floor  (Magnes Press, 2024), traces the Hebrew letter press across the Atlantic following the mass Jewish immigration and tells the story of the emergence of the Hebrew and Yiddish press in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century. Her current research offers a spatial history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the United States in the early 1900s.