At the time of her birth, Naomi Schor's Polish-born parents Ilya and Resia Schor were artists who had recently immigrated to the US as refugees from war-torn Europe. Ilya Schor was a painter, jeweler and artist of Judaica, and Resia Schor was a painter who later worked in silver and gold and mixed media on sculptural jewelry and Judaica. The Schors lived among a polyglot community of émigrés, among them musicians, intellectuals, and artists. Naomi Schor’s first language was French, and she went to the Lycée Français de New York where she received her Baccalauréat in 1961, the same year, sadly, that her father died. Schor received her B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College then received her PhD in French Literature from Yale. There Schor occasionally wrote her scholarly essays in French.

Schor was one of the early proponents of French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory in American literary studies. She wrote about canonical authors such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, re-examining their work through the double lens of the male-authored theoretical discourse of Jacques Derrida (whom she knew personally), Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and that of French feminist theoreticians such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.

Schor was the founding co-editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, in 1989, a critical forum where the problematics of difference is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social.

An area of Schor’s expertise was the work of the feminist psychoanalytic theorist Luce Irigaray. With Carolyn Burke and Margaret Whitford, she edited Engaging with Irigaray, which included essays by Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Weed, and Judith Butler. With differences co-founder and co-editor Weed, Schor edited a number of differences books, including The Essential Difference in 1994 and Queer Theory Meets Feminism in 1997.

Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine is considered one of Schor’s most influential books. In this classic 1987 work of aesthetic and feminist theory, available in a 2006 paperback edition, Schor provided new ways of thinking about the gendering of details and ornament in literature, art, and architecture.

In other writings she developed the concept of female fetishism, in her many writings on the work of George Sand; she examined the question of idealism, also in relation to Sand, and in her late writings and research revisited the concept of universalism in an era of identity politics and difference.

Schor was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1963—64), a number of Fulbright Award Fellowships to France, NEH Fellowships (1981 and 1990—91), a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990: She was also elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. Schor taught at Columbia, Brown (from 1978 to 1989) where she held the Nancy Duke Lewis Chair from 1985 to 1989, Duke where she was the William Hanes Wannamaker Professor of Romance Studies Chair, and Harvard. At the time of her death (of a brain hemorrhage) Schor was the Benjamin F. Barge professor of French at Yale.

Naomi Schor’s papers are part of the Pembroke Center Archive's Elizabeth Weed Feminist Theory Papers collection, held at the John Hay Library at Brown University.

At the time of her death she was married to Howard Bloch, a medievalist in Yale's French department. A first marriage, to Breton poet Paol Keineg, ended in divorce.