In 1996, Brenner created an installation on Ellis Island, in New York, featuring several prominent Jewish Americans, including Lauren Bacall, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mark Spitz and Mayor Ed Koch among others.
He spent 25 years chronicling the diaspora of the Jews across the world from Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Morocco to Ethiopia, Sarajevo to Samarkand.
[2] Brenner’s opus Diaspora: Homelands in Exile was published as a two-volume set of photographs and texts by HarperCollins in 2003 and appeared in four foreign editions.
In reviewing the book, The New Yorker wrote: "Brenner's work—elegiac, celebratory, irreverent—transcends portraiture, representing instead a prolonged, open-ended inquiry into the nature of identity and heritage.
[10] The photographers working on this project include Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington.