Presenter Bios
Talia Bodner is a junior in high school. In summer 2020, she participated in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Thought Leaders.
Nir Braudo is a member of the founding committee of BINA’s Secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv and is now head of the yeshiva and a teacher there. He founded the Beersheba branch of BINA and was the director of BINA's Social Action program (BINA BaShchuna) in Beersheba and Tel Aviv. Previously he served as central shaliach for the WZO in the United States.
Erica Brown is the director of the Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership and an associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at The George Washington University. She was a Jerusalem Fellow, is a faculty member of the Wexner Foundation, an Avi Chai Fellow, and the recipient of the 2009 Covenant Award for her work in education. She is the author of twelve books on leadership, the Hebrew Bible, and spirituality, including Inspired Jewish Leadership: Practical Approaches to Building Strong Communities and Leadership in the Wilderness: Authority and Anarchy in the Book of Numbers. Her most recent book is The Book of Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile.
James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo. He earned an LLB from Osgoode Hall Law School, an LLM in International Legal Studies at New York University School of Law, and, while practicing civil litigation, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Jewish Thought from the University of Toronto. He was the international director of the Friedberg Genizah Project. His books, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, and Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider, garnered Canadian Jewish book awards; the latter a Jordan Schnitzer Notable Selection Prize. He has published widely on Jewish thought from the Bible to Maimonides to Rav Kook. His most recent book is Jewish Theology Unbound.
Marc Michael Epstein has been teaching at Vassar College since 1992, and currently serves as Director of Jewish Studies. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, received his Ph.D. at Yale University, and did much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has written on various topics in visual and material culture produced by, for, and about Jews. His most recent book, Skies Of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Princeton, 2015) was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award. His The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (Yale, 2011) was selected by the London Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2011. He is currently completing a new book, People of the Image: Jews & Art. During the 1980s, Epstein was Director of the Hebrew Books and Manuscripts division of Sotheby’s Judaica department, and he continues to serve as consultant to various libraries, auction houses, museums, and private collectors.
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. Her research interests include Hebrew culture (biblical and modern); history of ideas (particularly of Zionism and its contexts); gender and cultural studies; and psychoanalytic criticism. Her book Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative explores the reverberations of the Akedah story in Israeli culture.
Richard Elliott Friedman is the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and is the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Harvard University. His book Who Wrote the Bible? has sold over 250,000 copies and was the subject of a three-hour television special. His other books include The Disappearance of God (published in paperback as The Hidden Face of God), The Hidden Book in the Bible, Commentary on the Torah, The Bible with Sources Revealed, The Bible Now (co-authored with Shawna Dolansky). His most recent book is The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters. He offers weekly lectures on the jewishLIVE program “Richard Elliott Friedman: Return to Torah.”
Elliot Vaisrub Glassenberg is an American-Canadian-Israeli queer Jewish educator and activist. Elliot is a senior educator at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change and co-chair of Right Now: Advocates for Asylum Seekers in Israel.
Elyse Goldstein is the spiritual leader of The City Shul in Toronto, Canada. She founded Kolel: The Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning in 1991, where she spent two decades as its director and principal teacher. In 2005 she received The Covenant Award For Outstanding Educators. Her first book, ReVisions: Seeing Torah through a Feminist Lens, was published in 1998 and won the Canadian National Jewish Book Award in the field of Bible. Her second and third books, The Women’s Torah Commentary (2000), and The Women’s Haftarah Commentary (2003), are anthologies of 54 women rabbis from different movements on the weekly Torah and Haftarah. Her book New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future, published in 2008, was a finalist in The National Jewish Book Awards.
David N. Gottlieb received his Ph.D. in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2018. A member of the teaching faculty at Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, he is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019).
Edward L. Greenstein is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Before that he taught full-time at Tel Aviv University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Widely published, Greenstein edited the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society for 46 years. His Essays on Biblical Method and Translation (1989) was reissued with a new preface in 2020. His well-received Job: A New Translation (2019) was awarded a prize by the Association for Jewish Studies. Among his fellowships and awards is the EMET Prize ("Israel's Nobel"). He is writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.
Shai Held is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at Hadar, where he also directs the Center for Jewish Leadership and Ideas. Previously, he served for six years as Scholar-in-Residence at Kehilat Hadar in New York City, and taught both theology and halakhah at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as Director of Education at Harvard Hillel. A 2011 recipient of the prestigious Covenant Award for excellence in Jewish education, he has been named multiple times to Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Harvard and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His essays on the Torah have been collected and published in two volumes in The Heart of Torah.
Aaron Henne is Artistic Director of theatre dybbuk. He teaches storytelling throughout the country and has designed and facilitated creative workshops for Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Dreamworks. He was an American Jewish University Dream Lab Fellow and the Diane Luboff Scholar at the Cutter Colloquium at HUC-JIR, has served as a professional mentor at Otis College of Art and Design, as faculty for the Wexner Heritage Program, and as a consultant for a wide variety of organizations. Henne was selected as a pilot Wexner Field Fellow.
Zoe Jick is Associate Director of Jewish Content at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. Zoe’s work at the OFJCC is in partnership with BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. Previously, Zoe founded an immersive Jewish learning program at BINA, called Beit Midrash TLV.
Miryam Kabakov is the executive director of Eshel. She has a background in organizational development, social research, program evaluation, social work, and community building. Miryam is the editor of Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires (North Atlantic Books, May 2010) a collection of writings about the challenges and joys of LGBT Orthodox Jews. Previously, she was the national program director of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, Coordinator of LGBT programming at the JCC Manhattan, and the first social worker at Footsteps.
Reuven Kimelman is Professor of Classical Rabbinic Literature at Brandeis University. His work specializes in the history of Judaism with a focus on the history and meaning of the Jewish liturgy. He teaches courses and directs doctoral work in Talmud, Midrash, Liturgy, Ethics, and the Jewish Political tradition. He co-directs the program with Bernadette Brooten in Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity. His most recent courses include The Western Canon, Midrashic Literature: Sifre Deuteronomy, and Understanding Evil and Human Destiny.
Aaron Koller is an associate professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, where he studies the ancient world of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, especially material culture, language, and intellectual history. He is interested in life as it was lived in ancient times, and finds that studying the languages of ancient times provides windows into all sorts of issues. He is interested especially in Near Eastern cultures from the late Bronze Age through rabbinic literature. His most recent book is Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought.
Rachel Korazim is a freelance Jewish education consultant in curriculum development for Israel and Holocaust education. She engages audiences worldwide through innovative presentations built around the stories, poems and songs of Israel’s best writers. Until 2008, Rachel was the Academic Director of distance learning programs at The Jewish Agency for Israel, Department of Education. Rachel teaches at Pardes and the Shalom Hartman Institute, as well as in numerous Jewish communities worldwide.
Joy Ladin holds the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University, and, in 2007, became the first (and still only) openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and her recent book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award. She has also published numerous books of poetry. A nationally recognized speaker on transgender and Jewish identity, she serves on the Board of Keshet, an organization devoted to full inclusion of LGTBQ Jews in the Jewish world.
Jon D. Levenson is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago and at Wellesley College. His work concentrates on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, including its reinterpretations in the "rewritten Bible" of Second Temple Judaism and rabbinic midrash. In all his work, Levenson's emphasis falls on the close reading of texts for purposes of literary and theological understanding. His books The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and Inheriting Abraham are especially relevant to this collection.
Yocheved Grunberger Lindenbaum lives in Teaneck with her husband, Nathan. She has taught Judaic Studies and now works as a chaplain at Holy Name hospice. Her most precious titles are Eema and Bubs!
Shaul Magid is the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. From 2004-2018 he was a professor of religious studies and the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Chair of Jewish Studies in Modern Judaism at Indiana University, as well as a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Before that he served from 1996-2004 as a professor of Jewish philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy from 2000-2004. He is the author of American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society, and his book Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism was published in 2019.
Ruby Namdar is an award-winning novelist. He was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, Haviv (2000), won The Ministry of Culture's Award for Best First Publication. His novel The Ruined House won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, the first time the prize has been awarded to a novelist living outside Israel. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Kendell Pinkney is a Brooklyn based theatre-maker, Jewish-life consultant, and rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has been featured in Saturday Night Seder and on the Crooked podcast Unholier than Thou, and his collaborative works have been presented at many performing arts venues. Kendell’s broader interest in racial and ethnic diversity among Jews led him to team up with spoken-word artist, Vanessa Hidary, to produce Kaleidoscope, a monologue showcase that foregrounds the stories of Jews of Color and Jews from Sephardic and Mizrachi backgrounds. In addition to his creative arts work, he is the rabbinic intern for the Jewish arts and culture organizations Reboot and LABA, and he is the Spiritual Director of Ammud: The Jews of Color Torah Academy.
Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer, and Torah teacher. She creates multi-genre works of experimental beauty which explore the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life. As a musician and performer, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women with accompanying curriculum, and A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, a chamber-rock opera about the intersection of finance and spirituality which is currently being made into an independent feature film.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, core faculty in the in the Science and Society Program, and affiliated faculty in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a B.A. in Religion and English from Williams College, an M.Phil. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009) Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2014), and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (2017)
Jeffrey Saks is the founding director of ATID – The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education, in Jerusalem, and its WebYeshiva.org program. He also serves as the Editor of the journal Tradition, Series Editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, and Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem, and a consulting editor of The Lehrhaus. A three-time graduate of Yeshiva University (BA, MA, Semicha), he was a Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute.
Jeffrey Stackert is a biblical scholar who situates the Hebrew Bible in the context of the larger ancient Near Eastern world in which it was composed. His research focuses especially on the composition of the Pentateuch, ancient Near Eastern prophecy, cultic texts, and ancient Near Eastern law. His first book, Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation (Mohr Siebeck, 2007), addresses literary correspondences among the biblical legal corpora and especially the relationships between similar laws in Deuteronomy and pentateuchal Priestly literature. It was honored with the 2010 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise.
Abby Chava Stein is a Jewish educator, author, speaker, and activist. She was born and raised in a Hasidic family of rabbinic descent, and is a direct descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Abby attended Yeshiva, completing a rabbinical degree in 2011. In 2012, she left the Hasidic world to explore a self-determined life. In 2015 Abby came out as a woman of trans experience. Since coming out, she has been working to raise support and awareness for trans rights and those leaving Ultra-Orthodoxy. In 2016, she was named by The Jewish Week as one of the “36 Under 36” young Jews who are inspiring change in the world. In 2018 she was awarded the Pride Award by the Brooklyn Borough President. She studied gender studies and political science at Columbia University in New York City. Her memoir Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman was published by Seal Press in November 2019.
James VanderKam is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame and specializes in the literature and history of early Judaism. His research in the last twenty years has focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and related texts. His most recent books include a collection of essays entitled From Revelation to Canon: Studies in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature (2000), An Introduction to Early Judaism (2001), The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2002), From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile (2004), 1 Enoch 2 (2012), and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible (2012).
Dov Weiss is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Departments of Religion, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School as a Martin Meyer Fellow in 2011 and was the Alan M. Stock Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies in 2012. Specializing in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation and rabbinic theology, his first book, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press), won the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship.
Wendy Zierler is associate professor of Feminist Studies and Modern Jewish Literature at HUC-JIR in New York. A former research fellow in the English Department of Hong Kong University and a Fulbright Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she received her Ph.D. and her M.A. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Yeshiva University, Stern College. She is the author of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing (2004) and Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation (2017).
More Information about the Partners Behind the Akedah Project
About 929 English
929 is the number of chapters in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the formative text of the Jewish heritage. 929 English is a cutting-edge project dedicated to creating a global Jewish conversation around issues that unite and divide us, but always anchored in or inspired by Tanakh. 929 invites Jews everywhere to read Tanakh, one chapter a day, together with a website with creative readings and pluralistic interpretations, including audio and video, by a wide range of writers, artists, rabbis, educators, scholars, students and more. As an outgrowth of the web-based platform, 929 English also offers a diverse selection of classes, lectures and live events across North America. For more information, please visit 929.org.il/.
About BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change
BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change designs and implements cultural, social and educational programs for Israelis and Jews from all over the world, with the goal of enhancing Jewish and Israeli identity, particularly among non-orthodox Israelis, empowering individuals and groups to make a difference in their own lives, in their community and throughout Israeli society and beyond. For more information, visit bina.org.il/en/.
About JewishLIVE and Judaism Unbound
JewishLIVE and Judaism Unbound are projects of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, a US-based non-profit organization whose work happens primarily online and is not limited by geography. Judaism Unbound is best known for producing one of the most-listened-to Jewish podcasts, now with well over one million downloads, which explores ideas at the cutting edge of Jewish life today. The Institute launched jewishLIVE in March of 2020 as an entry portal to the “digital Jewish wilderness” in which most Jews suddenly found themselves as the COVID-19 crisis began. jewishLIVE offers a stage to world-class innovators, thinkers, artists, musicians and ritualists to showcase their creativity and expertise. For more information, visit www.jewishlive.org and www.judaismunbound.com.
About the Oshman Family JCC
The Oshman Family Jewish Community Center (OFJCC) is a community-supported nonprofit on the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life which serves the South Peninsula through educational, social, cultural, fitness, sports and other programs. The OFJCC provides a common ground for Jewish institutions, other local groups, organizations and individuals to work, learn and play together for the betterment of the whole community. The OFJCC's registered trademarks are Live Fully® and Architects of the Jewish Future®. For more information, visit paloaltojcc.org or call (650) 223-8700.