Editor's Note

This issue is published in memory of Rachel Feldhay Brenner (1946–2021), a prolific scholar and beloved teacher. She was the Harvey L. Temkin and Barbara Myers Temkin Professor in Hebrew Language and Literature and Elaine Marks Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she had worked on the faculty for almost thirty years. She continued to teach until days before her death, and her sudden and untimely passing came as a shock to many of her colleagues and friends.

She demanded much of her students and even more of herself. She didn't suffer fools, but she used her keen critical eye to develop the talents and scholarship of a generation of female academics. Her presence at the Association for Jewish Studies Women's Caucus breakfast was a staple of the annual conference. Despite her diminutive size, she was a commanding presence who could dominate a room with her energy, anger, or pleasure. She was extremely loyal. She stood up for what she believed in, even when it wasn't popular, and while she rarely tried to please people, she was always surrounded by a coterie of friends and admirers.

She served as the president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007–2009, was a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and, at the time of her passing, was a board member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Her training in literature afforded her multiple avenues for her professional talents. She worked on memoir, fiction, and poetry in Polish, English, French, and Hebrew, in different cultural and historical contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the time of her passing, her scholarship was reaching new heights, and some of her best and most impactful work was produced in the last few years of her life, culminating in The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries, From Warsaw 1939–1945 (2014), which was awarded The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies; and Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies, 1942–1947 (2019).

In recognition of her monumental contributions to the field, The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) has created The Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award in Polish-Jewish Studies to honor her life's work, and the Mossey/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created the Rachel Feldhay Brenner fund for research and study of the Holocaust.

The articles here address topics that were central to her life work—literature and memoir during and after the holocaust, its impact on the shaping of Jewish identity in the twentieth century, and the role of language and literature in shaping Jewish and non-Jewish engagement with Israel. Her friend and collaborator Phyllis Lassner provides our In Memoriam.

She is much missed.