Professor Rachel Feldhay Brenner of the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies has been awarded the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professorship in Jewish Studies from the Weinstein-Mosse Center for Jewish Studies.
The Weinstein-Bascom Professorship is designated for a faculty member who has through exemplary teaching and distinguished scholarship or artistic creativity contributed to a deeper understanding of the Jewish experience.
Brenner’s research focuses on literary representations of the search for the coexistence of ethical values with the consciousness of the Holocaust.
Currently, she is exploring the responses to the Holocaust in diaries and literary works of five prominent Polish writers in war-time Warsaw to examine the extent of empathy that they exhibited toward the Jews who were experiencing genocide in Poland.