Emanuela was born in Jerusalem. Her father, Moshe Barasch, was an art historian. He encouraged her humanistic education and enthusiastically nurtured her intellectual curiosity. The choice of studying in the faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University was a natural one. Her B.A. is in Comparative Literature and Philosophy. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in the field of Comparative Religion. She taught at the Comparative Religions graduate program at Tel Aviv University and is now teaching at the Reichman University (IDC) in Herzlya. She lives in Tel Aviv but often travels to London, as her husband is a professor at the London School of Economics.

Emanuela has published scholarly books on the cultural perception of Nazism. Her books, The Devil, the Saints, and the Church (Peter Lang, 2004), and Nazi Devil (Magnes Press, 2010) deal with literary descriptions of the Nazis in terms of the Christian devil. Another book, Mephisto in the Third Reich (De Gruyter Press, 2014), provides various cultural explanations for the Holocaust.

In recent years Emanuela has engaged in literary writing. A collection of five novellas, Five Selves, was published by Holland House Books in the UK. She wrote the stories in Hebrew and translate them into English. The book got excellent reviews, including a Publishers Weekly Starred Review.  Short stories she wrote were published in literary magazines. Delivery, a novel about various aspects of having a child, was published in Hebrew in 2018 by  Hakibbutz Hameuchad. The English translation will be published by Holland House Books in 2021.

Just as important: Emanuela has three sons.  This part of her life is just as crucial in shaping a personal perspective as are her academic and literary achievements.