Eliza went from playing the oboe (breathing and blowing lots of hot air into a small opening), to writing poetry (writing about breathing hot air for a very small audience), to making sound art (recording the sounds of other people breathing hot air, as well as sighing, um-ing and ah-ing). In 2001, she proposed a sound installation, Breathing Traces, to the Berlin Jewish Museum: a large room, with speaker-cones hanging from the ceiling, each speaker playing a recording of the sounds of one Jewish resident of Berlin. A curiosity cabinet of souls, breathing their way through life... The proposal was ultimately rejected, but it led her to read Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida, which (long story short) pushed her to begin writing what became her dissertation, "Freud's Moses: Memory Material and Immaterial" (2007), which became the book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (Fordham University Press, 2009).

She is currently re-preparing a Haggadah for the Wicked and the Wandering and working on some other things.

Eliza has organized a number of panels, but the most infamous one was in May 2006 at the New York Public Library: Freud's Foreskin: A Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Most Suggestive Circumcision in History.

Teaching positions have been in departments of literature, interdisciplinary study, religion and history; institutions include Parsons School of Design, New School University; Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (NYU); Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY); and the University of California, San Diego. Eliza's courses focus on memory and forgetting, literary theory, Moses and multiplicity, hearing voices, race and religion, inventing tradition, psychoanalysis, and the history of anti-semitism.