Lori Hope Lefkovitz (born May 6, 1956), the Ruderman Professor of Jewish Studies, directs the Northeastern Humanities Center and the Jewish Studies Program at Northeastern University. She is the founding director of Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women and Gender Studies, the first such center at a rabbinical seminary.
Northeastern University is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, established in 1898. It is categorized as an R1 institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus in the Fenway-Kenmore, Roxbury, South End, and Back Bay neighborhoods of Boston. The university has satellite campuses in Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington; San Jose, California; and Toronto, Canada, that exclusively offer graduate degrees. Northeastern recently purchased the New College of the Humanities in London and plans to open an additional campus in Vancouver, Canada. The university's enrollment is approximately 18,000 undergraduate students and 8,000 graduate students.
A graduate of Brandeis University, Lefkovitz received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University and was a recipient of a Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship in women's studies, a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at Hebrew University, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, and in 2004, a Fulbright Professorship at Hebrew University. She was previously an associate professor at Kenyon College.
Brandeis University is an American private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts, 9 miles (14 km) west of Boston. Founded in 1948 as a non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jewish community, Brandeis was established on the site of the former Middlesex University. The university is named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the U.S Supreme Court.
Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, it is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.
Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio. It was founded in 1824 by Philander Chase. Kenyon College is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission.
Among the courses she teaches or has taught at RRC are: Literary Approaches to Bible; Bible and the Feminist Imagination; Writing for the Rabbinate; Gender and Judaism; Queering Jewish Studies; Jewish Literature.
Since Kolot's founding in 1996, Lefkovitz has convened a landmark conference, together with the Renfrew Center, on Food, Body Image & Judaism, which examined eating disorders; established the Rosh Hodesh: "It's a girl thing!" program, that has popularly been adopted across the country; and, together with Ma'yan, co-founded Ritualwell.org, a Web site for contemporary Jewish ritual now maintained exclusively by Kolot, with Lefkovitz its Executive Editor. Through a joint initiative, she established a program with Temple University awarding a certificate in Jewish Women's Studies.
Ritualwell is a website that allows users to find, create and share Jewish rituals. It was initially launched in 2001 and was nominated for a Webby Award in the Religion & Spirituality category in 2003. The site was redesigned and relaunched in 2005. It seeks to "increase the number of rituals available for holidays, Shabbat and traditional lifecycle events.
Temple University is a state-related research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell. In 1882, Conwell came to Pennsylvania to lead the Grace Baptist Church while he began tutoring working-class citizens late at night to accommodate their work schedules. These students, later dubbed "night owls", were taught in the basement of Conwell's Baptist Temple, hence the origin of the university's name and mascot. By 1907, the institution revised its institutional status and was incorporated as a university.
Lefkovitz serves on editorial and professional boards and lectures widely to academic and Jewish audiences. She is married to Rabbi Leonard Gordon, spiritual leader of Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill, MA, with whom she has two daughters.
Reconstructionist Judaism is a modern Jewish movement that views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization and is based on the conceptions developed by Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983). The movement originated as a semi-organized stream within Conservative Judaism and developed from the late 1920s to 1940s, before it seceded in 1955 and established a rabbinical college in 1967.
The role of women in Judaism is determined by the Hebrew Bible, the Oral Law, by custom, and by cultural factors. Although the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature mention various female role models, religious law treats women differently in various circumstances.
In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. The basic form of the rabbi developed in the Pharisaic and Talmudic era, when learned teachers assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws. The first sage for whom the Mishnah uses the title of rabbi was Yohanan ben Zakkai, active in the early-to-mid first century CE. In more recent centuries, the duties of a rabbi became increasingly influenced by the duties of the Protestant Christian minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis", and in 19th-century Germany and the United States rabbinic activities including sermons, pastoral counseling, and representing the community to the outside, all increased in importance.
The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is a Conservative Jewish education organization in New York City, New York. It is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism and a major center for academic scholarship in Jewish studies.
The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is a Jewish seminary with several locations in the United States and one location in Jerusalem. It is the oldest extant Jewish seminary in the Americas and the main seminary for training rabbis, cantors, educators and communal workers in Reform Judaism. HUC-JIR has campuses in Cincinnati, Ohio, New York City, Los Angeles, California and Jerusalem. The Jerusalem campus is the only seminary in Israel for training Reform Jewish clergy.
Jewish studies is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history, Middle Eastern studies, Asian studies, Oriental studies, religious studies, archeology, sociology, languages, political science, area studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies. Jewish studies as a distinct field is mainly present at colleges and universities in North America.
The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), is located in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, about 10 miles (16 km) north of central Philadelphia. RRC is the only seminary affiliated with Reconstructionist Judaism. It is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. RRC has an enrollment of approximately 80 students in rabbinic and other graduate programs.
Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.
Gender and Judaism is a radical, emerging subfield at the intersection of gender studies and Jewish studies. Gender studies centers on interdisciplinary research on the phenomenon of gender. It focuses on cultural representations of gender and people's lived experience. Jewish studies is a field that looks at Jews and Judaism, through such disciplines as history, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics, and sociology.
Galit Hasan-Rokem is the Max and Margarethe Grunwald professor of folklore at the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author and editor of numerous works, including co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Folklore (2012), her research interests include proverbs, folklore and culture of the Middle East, and folklore genres and narratives. She is also a published poet and translator of poetry, and a Pro-Palestinian activist. The Jerusalem Post has called her "a figure of some prominence in Jerusalem intellectual circles".
Dan Ehrenkrantz is an American Reconstructionist rabbi, currently serving as the outgoing president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania.
Bradford Humes Young, also known as Brad Young, is a professor of Biblical Literature in Judeo Christian Studies at the Graduate Department of Oral Roberts University (ORU). He is also founder and president of the Gospel Research Foundation, Inc.
The first openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clergy in Judaism were ordained as rabbis and/or cantors in the second half of the 20th century.
Christine Hayes is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University, former Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and one of the foremost American academics focusing on talmudic-midrashic studies and Classical Judaica.
Yael S. Feldman is an Israeli-born American scholar and academic particularly known for her work in comparative literature and feminist Hebrew literary criticism. She is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education in the Judaic Studies Department at New York University and an Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Feldman has lectured and published internationally, and served as editor of both general and academic journals. Her research interests include Hebrew culture ; history of ideas ; gender and cultural studies; and psychoanalytic criticism.
Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Ph.D. is the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Jewish Reconstructionist Communities. Waxman was inaugurated as the president of both on October 26, 2014. The ceremony took place at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Waxman is believed to be the first woman rabbi and first lesbian to lead a Jewish congregational union, and the first lesbian to lead a Jewish seminary; the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is both a congregational union and a seminary. She previously served as the vice-president for governance for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. In 2015 she was named as one of The Forward 50.
This is a timeline of LGBT Jewish history, which consists of events at the intersection of Judaism and queer people.
Rabbi Benay Lappe is Talmudist and publicist on Talmud. She is an American rabbi and a teacher of Talmud in the USA. In 2016, Rabbi Lappe was awarded the Covenant Award for innovation in Jewish education by the Covenant Foundation.
Aryeh Cohen is an American rabbi and scholar who serves as a professor of Rabbinic Literature at American Jewish University. His scholarship focuses on the Talmud, Jewish ethics, and social justice.
