Rabbi Wendy Zierler, Ph.D.

Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies

Contact Information

school/program: Rabbinical School (US)
academic field: Jewish Language and Literature
campus: New York

Rabbi Wendy Ilene Zierler, Ph.D., 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 M.A. from Princeton University; her B.A. from Stern College of Yeshiva University; and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. In June 2021, she received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva Maharat. She is the author 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), as well as 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 Rabbi Joshua Garroway, HUC Press 2022), and Building A City: Writings on Agnon’s Buczacz in Memory Alan Mintz (with Sheila Jelen, Indiana University Press, 2022). 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. 

These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness

Shir Hadash shel Yom: Hebrew Poetry and Prayer

Jewish Pandemic Literature

Both These and Those: The Fiction of Agnon and Baron in Literary Conversation

Movies and Midrash

And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing

Illness and Healing in Jewish Literature

Hebrew Poetry and Prayer

Reel Theology

Agnon and Baron

Ph.D., M.A., Princeton University

B.A., Stern College of Yeshiva University

M.F.A. in Fiction Writing, Sarah Lawrence College

Rabbinic Ordination from Yeshiva Maharat