Deborah Bochner Kennel

It is with deep sorrow that we announce the passing of Deborah Bochner Kennel at the age of 85 years. She died peacefully in Richmond, Virginia on November 20, 2025, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Born to Salomon Bochner, a renowned mathematician at Princeton University, and Naomi Weinberg Bochner, Deborah grew up just steps from the campus in Princeton, New Jersey. Dinner-table conversation in the Bochner household often involved math, philosophy, music, or the finer points of grammar and shaped Debby’s lifelong love of knowledge. A gifted student, Debby graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1961 and pursued a master’s degree in history at Yale before beginning a Phd program in Renaissance history at Harvard, completing all but her dissertation.

Deborah met physicist Charles F. Kennel in Princeton and the pair married in 1964. They spent an adventurous year in Trieste, Italy, where Deborah perfected both her Italian language and cooking skills, before moving to Los Angeles. There, Debby quickly created a rich community of friends and colleagues and, with greater effort, eventually mastered the LA freeway system, though she never gave up her trusty Thomas Guide.

In Los Angeles, she and Charlie raised two children, Matthew Bochner Kennel and Sarah Alexandra Kennel, in a house filled with art, music, and books. After her marriage to Charlie ended in 1984, Debby met William Fitz-Gibbon, a math teacher at Walter Reed Middle School, and the two eventually married. Their partnership—built on affection, shared love of knowledge, and mutual exasperation—brought her great happiness, as did the expansion of her family with Bill’s daughter Sorel Fitz-Gibbon and grandchildren Taylor, Eric and Emmie. The marriage of Debby’s daughter Sarah to John Maggs in 2009 and the birth of their children Ari and Talia completed Debby’s long-held wish for a larger, loving family.

Debby gravitated toward academia throughout her life, teaching history at Occidental College, Mount St. Mary’s College, and Santa Monica College, before landing at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, where she put her sharp mind, insatiable curiosity about people, and exacting prose style to good use as an editor. With her encyclopedic knowledge of history and culture, Debby was also a formidable travel companion, although her vast intellect, notably, did not extend to a sense of direction.

Outside academia, Debby channeled her passion for ideas (and opinions) into the Westside Democrats, her UCLA Faculty reading group, and her Kehillat Ma’arav community in Santa Monica. A generous hostess known for her sense of humor, excellent cooking, and bottomless appetite for conversation, Debby possessed an astonishing memory for detail and a remarkable ability to tell a long and intricate story, complete with digressions, footnotes, and witty character analysis. She also harbored a legendary concern for the hidden dangers that threatened her loved ones, including the perils of hiking, unqualified physicians, bony fish, and killer bees. She was an exceptionally loving grandmother and always maintained a soft spot for orphaned cats, who seemed to show up with some regularity at her doorstep in the hills of Brentwood.

Deborah was preceded in death by her husband Bill Fitz-Gibbon and is survived by her children and stepchildren, Matthew, Sarah (John Maggs) and Sorel (David Paige); her grandchildren Ari and Talia; Sorel’s children Taylor, Eric, and Emmie and many beloved friends, colleagues and extended family who cherished her warmth, humor, and vivid presence.