Chai Feldblum

Chai Rachel Feldblum (born April 1959) is a Commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a former American law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and an author and activist for disability rights and LGBT rights. In fall 2009, she was nominated to a position on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) by President Barack Obama, in April 2010, she received a recess appointment to the EEOC, and in December 2010 she was confirmed to serve on the EEOC by the United States Senate. The Senate confirmed her in December 2013 for a second term on the Commission which will expire in July 2018.

Chai Feldblum was born in New York City to Meyer Simcha and Esther Feldblum. Meyer Simcha Feldblum was born in Lithuania and survived the Holocaust by living in the forests of Poland. He came to the United States following WWII, where he earned his ordination and Ph.D from Yeshiva University in NYC and became a rabbi and a Professor of Talmud, first at Yeshiva University and then at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Esther Feldblum was the daughter of Rabbi Ephraim Eliezer Yolles, a Hasidic Rebbe (the Samborer Rebbe) of Philadelphia. Esther Feldblum received her Ph.D in Jewish history from Columbia University and taught for one year at Brooklyn College before dying in a car accident at the age of 41. Her dissertation, The American Catholic Press and the Jewish State: 1917-1959, was published as a book posthumously.

Chai Feldblum grew up in Washington Heights in New York City. Her Orthodox Jewish upbringing shaped her commitment to social justice work.

Chai Feldblum attended the Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Manhattan, New York before majoring in Ancient Studies and Religion at Barnard College. Feldblum received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1985. Coming from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis she once aspired to be a talmudic scholar. She left Orthodox Judaism by the time she was a "young adult".

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