Adi Nester

My research and teaching interests focus on the interrelations of music, literature, and philosophy in the German and German-Jewish traditions. I am especially interested in the ways in which aesthetics and aesthetic theories inform our understanding of concepts like identity and difference.

My first book came out with Cornell UP in 2025. It explores the expressions of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through biblical-themed operas, the German-language literary works they are based on, and the intellectual debates surrounding them. By focusing on opera and the Bible as the primary scenes for exploring the concept of Jewish difference, my book identifies two parallel historical discourses that helped articulate German-Jewish difference as an unsettled difference that cannot be contained by a major-minor relation and thereby resists the possibility of a stable German-Jewish identity.

I currently work on two new book projects, the first explores questions of continuity and discontinuity in contemporary German-Jewish literature and culture, while the second studies the connection between music, pain, and pathology in German literature and beyond.

Select Recent Publications

Monographs:

Adi Nester. Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2025).

 Peer-reviewed articles:

• “Music Drama Mediated: Thomas Mann on the Literary Wagner” Modernism/modernity  (Forthcoming, Winter 2026)
• "The Temporality of De-Integration: Memory, History, Poetry, and the German Jewish Position in Max Czollek’s Work", Oxford German Studies 54/2 (2025): 243-268.
• “Beyond representation: The Ethics of Music after Aushwitz in Adorno and Jankélévitch” Monatshefte 116/1 (2024): 1-24.
• “Silence, Medium, Transmission: Walter Benjamin’s Metaphysics of Language and Youth” in Force of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy, eds. Dennis Johannßen and Dominik Zechner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022): 125-141.
• “The End of Abstraction and the Beginning of the People: On Law and Representation in Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” German Quarterly 93/1 (2020): 19-36.
• “Eine ungeheure Epopöe unseres eigenen: Language and the Hebrew Bible in Rudolf Borchardt’s Das Buch Joram,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 94/1 (2019): 16-38.

Specializations

• Music and Sound
• German Jewish Studies from eighteenth century to the twenty-first century
• German-Hebrew relations
• Aesthetics
• Intellectual & Cultural History
• Critical Theory

Curriculum Vitae