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Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Rachel Feldhay Brenner was a Polish-born scholar of Jewish and Hebrew literature who taught at the University of Wisconsin and was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007 to 2009.

1946 to 2021Scholarship of Jewish literaturePresidency of Association for Israel StudiesTeaching Hebrew literature at Wisconsin

Born: 2 July 1946, Zabrze
Died: 4 February 2021, Madison
Occupation: literary theorist, writer, literary scholar
Education: Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, York University

Rachel Feldhay Brenner was born in 1946 in Zabrze

Rachel Feldhay was born in Zabrze, Poland, to Michael and Helena Feldhay. In 1956 she moved to Israel with her family. She grew up in Ramat Aviv.

She studied at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her PhD in 1986 at York University in Toronto, with research on the Jewish Canadian writer Mordecai Richler. This work later appeared as a book in 1989.

In 1992 she joined the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she taught until her death. She chaired the department from 2004 to 2007. She was a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served on the board of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

From 2007 to 2009 she was president of the Association for Israel Studies. In 2008 she published a book on the work of Ruth Almog. She died of cancer on February 4, 2021, and in 2021 an award in Polish-Jewish studies was founded in her name.