Rabbi Wendy Zierler

Wendy Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at HUC-JIR in New York. Prior to joining HUC-JIR she was a Research Fellow in the English Department of the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. and her MA from Princeton University and her BA from Stern College of Yeshiva University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. In June 2021, she received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva Maharat. She recently completed a new book, entitled Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish / COVID Years with Hebrew Poetry. She is the author, previously, of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation (SUNY Press, Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, 2017) and of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing (Wayne State UP, 2004), and many articles in the fields of Jewish literature and Jewish Gender Studies. She is co-editor with Carole Balin, of Behikansi atah, a collection of the trailblazing Hebrew writings of Hava Shapiro 1878-1943 (Resling Press, 2008). Her English translation of Shapiro’s writings, To Tread on New Ground: Selected Writings of Hava Shapiro, also co-edited with Carole Balin, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2014. Most recently she is co-editor of two books, These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness (with HUC colleague Joshua Garroway, HUC Press 2022), and Building A City: Writings on Agnon’s Buczacz in Memory Alan Mintz (with Sheila Jelen, Indiana University Press, 2023). In 2017, she was appointed Co-Editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, a leading scholarly journal in the field of Jewish Literature. As a fiction writer she has written short stories as well as a middle-grade Jewish fantasy novel entitled, The Return of Gerda Wertheimer. She is married to Daniel Feit, and has three adult children.