Jewish Rhetorics

Born and raised in Gaithersburg, MD, Janice Fernheimer earned her BA in English at the University of Maryland, College Park and both her MA in American Literature and her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. In Fall 2008, she was a visiting scholar at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute for Gender and Jewish Studies. Prior to joining the faculty at UK, she was Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At the University of Kentucky, she is the Zantker Charitable Foundation Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies; and a James B. Beam Institute for Kentucky Spirits Faculty Fellow at the University of Kentucky and teaches courses in rhetoric, technology, and Jewish Rhetorical Studies.

She is the author of Stepping Into Zion: Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews and the Remaking of Jewish Identity (University of Alabama Press 2014) and co-editor along with Michael Bernard-Donals of Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (Brandeis University Press 2014). She has published essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, Journal of Communication and Religion, Computers and Composition Online, Argumentation and Advocacy, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, Oral History Review, and Journal of Jewish Identities. Along with her research collaborators Dr. Beth L. Goldstein, Dr. Douglas A. Boyd, and Sarah Dorpinghaus she established the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, a repository of 122+ oral histories for Jewish Kentuckians housed at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. In collaboration with author/illustrator JT Waldman, she is currently authoring an archives and oral-history based transmedia project America’s Chosen Spirit which includes a webcomic and podcast series that detail the influences of Jews and other minorities on the Kentucky bourbon industry. In collaboration with students in Bourbon Oral History Spring 2021, she launched the Women in Bourbon Oral History Project. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can usually find her dancing salsa or swing or bicycling around Kentucky!

Michael Bernard-Donals is the Nancy Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an affiliate member of the Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. Professor Bernard-Donals received his PhD in English at Stony Brook University (SUNY), and taught English at Mississippi State University and the University of Missouri, Columbia, before coming to the University of Wisconsin in 1998. Professor Bernard-Donals’ work falls into three principal areas: the history and theory of rhetoric, particularly the relation between its classical roots and its contemporary iterations; contemporary critical theory, and its intersections with rhetorical theory; and questions of history, memory and representation, particularly as they bear on the Holocaust and other instances of state terror. His books include Mikhail Bakhtin Between Phenomenology and Marxism (Cambridge 1994); Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World (Yale, 1998, with Richard Glejzer); The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy (Cambridge, 1998); Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (SUNY 2001, with Richard Glejzer); An Introduction to Holocaust Studies (Prentice-Hall, 2004); and Forgetful Memory: Remembrance and Representation in the Wake of the Holocaust (SUNY, 2009).