Yael Feldman


Yael S. Feldman is an Israeli-born American scholar and academic particularly known for her work in comparative literature and feminist Hebrew literary criticism. She is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education in the Judaic Studies Department at New York University and an Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Feldman has lectured and published internationally, and served as editor of both general and academic journals. Her research interests include Hebrew culture ; history of ideas ; gender and cultural studies; and psychoanalytic criticism.

Biography

Feldman received her B.A. in Hebrew Literature and Language and
English Literature from Tel Aviv University in 1967 and her M.A. in Medieval
Hebrew Literature from Hebrew College in 1976. Her Ph.D. dissertation at
Columbia University was on the Hebrew-American poet Gabriel Preil who
was to become the subject of her first book, Modernism and Cultural Transfer:
Gabriel Preil and the Tradition of Jewish Literary Bilingualism. Her
MA thesis formed the basis of her second book, in Hebrew, Polarity and Parallel: Semantic Patterns in the Medieval Hebrew Qasida. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1981, she completed postdoctoral study at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Psychoanalytic theory has continued to inform her literary criticism as well as her studies on gender and biblical and Zionist
narratives, beginning with her third publication, Teaching the Hebrew Bible as Literature in Translation and subsequent articles. According to Glenda Abramson, writing in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, by the 1980s Feldman was seen as one of the leaders of the study of Israeli literary feminism along with Anne Golomb Hoffman and Naomi Sokoloff. Her No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction, published in 1999, was the first book-length treatment devoted to Israeli women writers and written from a feminist perspective. It was a finalist in the 2000 National Jewish Book Awards and its 2003 Hebrew translation won the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature. Her fifth book, Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative, is the first book-length study of the ethos of national sacrifice in modern Hebrew culture. Growing out of her abiding interest in the impact of the Bible on contemporary psycho-politics, gender, and violence, it explores the biblical and classical stories of potential and enacted sacrifice that have nourished myths of altruist heroism over the last century. This study was a finalist in the 2010 National Jewish Book Awards. It was described by Perry Meisel as “a dazzling synthesis of political and religious history, particularly the history of the State of Israel and the tradition of Biblical interpretation" and as an "essential reading for American readers" by Alicia Ostriker. Glory and Agony has been praised in Review of Biblical Literature, where Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer wrote "This fascinating, multifaceted, and erudite book... is both very enjoyable and highly thought provoking, and I can recommend it whole-heartedly."

Grants and awards

Feldman’s scholarship—twice a Finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards and the winner of the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature-was supported by various grants and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays Program, Littauer Foundation, Centers for Advanced Jewish Studies at Oxford and PENN Universities, Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Yad Vashem International Holocaust Research Center.

Editorial and Other Professional Activities

Feldman served for 17 years as the Culture and Art Editor of Ha-do'ar, an American Hebrew Journal of long standing. She has also served on the editorial boards of the academic journals Prooftexts, Hebrew Studies, Contemporary Women's Writings, and Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal. In 1992 she founded the Discussion Group for Modern Hebrew Literature at the Modern Language Association of America and served as its first Chair.

Selected publications

Articles

The following is a selection of the more than 60 refereed journal articles and book chapters authored by Yael Feldman.