A self-taught
polyglot, Shem-Ur has mastered eight languages:
Chinese, Russian, French, Italian, German,
Modern Greek,
Japanese and English. In 2021–2022, Shem-Ur was a research assistant in the Israel–China program at the
Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv (Israel). Shem-Ur's first book,
Where I Am, was published in 2021 by Pardes Publishing House in Israel. The book deals with the alienation and detachment of an Israeli translator living in Paris with her French husband and their child, and expresses the difficulty of immigrants in their new surrounding. An English edition of the book, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, was published in the United States in 2023 by
New Vessel Press.
Pulitzer Prize winner, author
Joshua Cohen, said that this book "establishes Dana Shem-Ur as one of the rising stars of the new Israeli literature". ==Translation work==