Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Rachel Feldhay Brenner (1946 – February 4, 2021) was a Polish-born college professor, writer, and scholar of Jewish literature. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007 to 2009.

Early life and education Rachel Feldhay was born in Zabrze, Poland, the daughter of Michael Feldhay and Helena Feldhay. She moved to Israel with her family in 1956. She earned a bachelor's degree at Hebrew University, a master's degree at Tel Aviv University, and a PhD at York University.

Career Brenner joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1992, in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies. She chaired the department from 2004 to 2007. She was a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007 to 2009. She served on the board of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA).

Publications Brenner published seven books, and more than 80 articles in academic journals Comparative Literature Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Israel Studies, Slavic Review, AJS Review, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Studies in Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Critical Inquiry. In 1992 she won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for literary criticism. A.M. Klein, The Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion (1990) Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum (1997) Inextricably Bonded—Israel Jewish and Arab Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003) The Freedom to Write: The Woman-Artist and the World in Ruth Almog’s Fiction (2008, in Hebrew) The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 (2014) Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies, 1942–1947 (2019)

Selected articles

"A. M. Klein's 'The Hitleriad': Against the Silence of the Apocalypse" (1990) The Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award in Polish-Jewish Studies was founded in 2021, in her memory, by the PIASA.