Diego Rotman’s research focuses on performative practices in historiography, contemporary art, Jewish material culture and theatre, and research-creation projects in relation to local history and urban space. He published articles on performance in the public space, place-making practice, art and activism, Jewish Material Culture, Yiddish and Jewish theatre in numerous journals, including Theatre Drama Review, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore, and Oxford Bibliographies. In addition to his writing, he is also an artist and curator. In 2000, he co-founded the Jerusalem-based Sala-manca Group and established the Mamuta Art and Research Center in 2009. Rotman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he served as the department head from 2019 to 2024.
Diego is currently working on his book based on a ten year research-creation project that approaches the sukkah (Jewish hut) as a stage and a container of religious, social, cultural, and symbolic meaning; as a fragile, portable structure of knowledge that, in its hybridity, brings together multiple localities, temporalities, and value systems; as sites that express affects and feelings of longing and belonging, as results of geopolitical policies; and as witnesses to extreme violence since the mythical time of the exodus from Egypt to current displacement due to contemporary wars. The artistic sukkot discussed in his project book function not only as collaborative artistic expressions and as structural comments on specific sukkot or sukkot in general but also as research tools, positioning the sukkah as a critical medium for engaging with broader questions concerning Jewish art and history as well as history and politics, temporary architecture, displacement, memory, and belonging in Israel/Palestine. The sukkah becomes a site that facilitates a critical analysis of the relationship between original and copy, ritual and repetition, sanctity and precarity, the domestic and the institutional, the disposable and the canonical.