Sheila Jelen

Sheila E. Jelen is a professor of Religion, Literature and Visual Culture as well as the History of Judaism in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Approaches (2025), Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance (2024), Israeli Salvage Poetics (2023) and Salvage Poetics: Post Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (2020). Her edited volumes include Building a City: Writings on Agnon’s Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz (2023) and Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (2017). Jelen is an associate editor for Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. She will be a fellow at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem this summer, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum next summer as she works on her next project: Recognize Someone? Post-Holocaust Photographic Identifications.