Shoshana Felman

Shoshana Felman was born in 1942

Felman was born in Tel Aviv in 1942 to a mother born in Russia and a father born in Romania. Her father was an electrical engineer who spoke 7 languages, and her grandfather was a Zionist intellectual. At 17 she wrote a letter to the mother of Hannah Szenes after seeing a play about her life, and the poet Avigdor Hameiri later published it in Hebrew and Hungarian.

She graduated from Ironi Hey High School in Tel Aviv and served in the army as an education officer. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English and French literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1964 and 1966. In 1970 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Grenoble with a dissertation on Stendhal.

Felman moved to the United States in the 1960s. She taught at Yale University from 1970 to 2004 and then became a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. Her work draws on the ideas of Jacques Lacan and links her to the Yale School of deconstruction.

Since the 1990s she has written on trauma and testimony, especially about the Holocaust. With Dori Laub she wrote the book Testimony, which deals with the Eichmann trial and Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Her books have been translated into many languages.