She teaches English and Comparative Literature at City College New York (CCNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, and directs CCNY’s Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts[1] Dekel is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey,[2] The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Movement,[3] and the Hebrew monograph Oedipus be-Kishinev (Oedipus in Kishinev).
[1] In 2019, Dekel published Tehran Children, which reconstructs her father Hannan's journey as a child refugee fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.
The book includes archival research, memoir, and travel reportage from Poland, Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran and Israel.
[6] Dekel's previous book in English, The Universal Jew, examines literary depictions of Jewish Nationhood and citizenship during the Zionist movement's formative period in the late nineteenth-century.
[7] Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy,[8] The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Guernica, and other print and online publications.