Harriet L. Parmet

Harriet Abbey Parmet (née Leibowitz; July 22, 1928 – October 24, 2022) was an American author and educator.

Work Parmet worked as a professor of literature and foreign languages at Lehigh University, and was a cofounder of their Jewish studies department. She has written extensively on religious views in Judaism and notably, Holocaust resistance fighter Haviva Reik. She particularly has criticized the lack of a "national hero figure" formed around Reik and her sacrifices during the Second World War.

She is the author of The Terror of Our Days: Four American Poets Respond to the Holocaust, a response of American poets who "articulate a collective consciousness" to the Holocaust, despite not having experienced it. In her writings on Judaism, she is notable for her article Rabbinic and Feminist Responses to Reproductive Technology, which discusses the contrast and similarities between feminist reviews on modern fertility treatments and interpretations by traditional Jewish halakha.

Personal life Parmet graduated with a degree from Gratz College and attended graduate school at Temple University. In 1949, she married her husband Sidney B. Parmet. She has two children, Jonathan and Howard.

Selected works