Yael Feldman
Yael S. Feldman is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor Emerita of Hebrew Culture and Education at New York University, where she taught Hebrew and Comparative Literatures and Gender Theory for 30 years. She holds a PhD from Columbia University, where she also trained in psychoanalytic theory, while honing her teaching skills in a foreign language. She has published and lectured internationally and was awarded various fellowships including Fulbright, NEH, Lady Davis, and the Oxford Center for Jewish Studies. Her study, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1999), was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. A Hebrew version, publisghed in Israel by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, Lelo heder mi-shelahen, received the Friedman Prize for Hebrew Literature for 2003. Her 2010 study, Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford University Press), examines the nexus of Bible, gender and psycho-politics in theories of nationalism, war, and peace, as well as in Israel and and modern Hebrew culture. It, too, was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. Feldman's most recent essay, "The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S.Y. Agnon's 'Holocaust Fiction," opens the 2023 essay collection Unsettling Jewish Knowledge (University of Pennsylvania Press, edited by A.C. Dailey, M. Kavka, and L. Levy).