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Advisory Board
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb • Dr.
Deborah J. Grenn • Rabbi Leah Novick
Dr. Alicia Ostriker • Rabbi
Rayzel Raphael • Melissa Weintraub
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, ordained in the Jewish Renewal movement in 1981, is one of the first ten women ordained in the United States. Her creative vision has helped to shape the Jewish Renewal movement ever since. A ritualist, midrashist, and theologian, her book She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism, is a groundbreaking exploration of Jewish archetypes of women and of the Divine feminine. She is the founder of the feminist theater troupe Bat Kol, which brought midrash, storytelling, and ceremony to hundreds of audiences. Rabbi Gottlieb is also a peacemaker who has been working on Jewish-Palestinian relations since 1966.
Rabbi Gottlieb is the co-founder of Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she served for many years. Gottlieb now lives in Southern California, where she heads a new organization called Interfaith Inventions. This initiative is related to her work as co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish Peace Walk that created pilgrimages between synagogues and mosques and other supporting faith communities throughout the U.S. and Canada. As part of her interfaith community efforts, she is currently working on issues that relate to the way globalization is impacting the lives of young women around the world.
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Dr. Deborah J. Grenn
Deborah J. Grenn, Ph.D. and kohenet, is Core Faculty in New College of California Women's Spirituality MA Program. She is founder and director of The Lilith Institute (www.lilithinstitute.com) and Voice of the Spirit, a women's spirituality/study circle and series. Dr. Grenn hosted "Honoring The Sacred Feminine," a bimonthly segment on women and spirituality on KVON Radio, Napa, and co-produces the annual Napa Valley Women's Rites of Spring Festival.
Dr. Grenn's current research focuses on the religious/cultural identities, beliefs and ritual practices among the Lemba and other African Diasporic Jews & European-American Jewish women. Her publications include: Lilith's Fire (Universal Publishers, 2000), "How Women Construct And Are Formed By Spirit: She Who Is Everywhere In Women's Voices" in She Is Everywhere! edited by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2005) and "Connecting With Deity Through a Feminist Metaformic Theology" in Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture (www.metaformia.com, 2005) edited by Judy Grahn. Dr. Grenn serves on the Advisory Board of Catalyst to Coalition, which sponsors conferences focused on Anti-Semitism and the Left.
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Rabbi Leah Novick
Rabbi Leah Novick is the oldest of the women rabbis in America. She is a spiritual teacher whose work is focuised on the Shekhinah (Divine feminine) within Judaism. She draws on traditional knowledge, combining it with meditation and guided visualization in her workshops. She is a liturgist, mystic, and theologian, and her work bringing the feminine back into Jewish ritual has been honored widely.
Rabbi Novick is also a performance artist: her most recent work is titled “The Peaceful Maccabee” and describes the life of Queen Salome Alexandra of Judea as well as eight other historical Jewish women. Rabbi Novick travels widely for lectures and workshops, teaching on the Zohar and many other topics. She is founder and spiritual adviser to Ruach Ha’Aretz, a West Coast retreat group.
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Dr. Alicia Ostriker
Dr. Alicia Ostriker is a world-renowned poet and writer, as well as a midrashist, literary critic, and professor of English literature. Her books include No Heaven, The Volcano Sequence, Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, Feminist Revision and the Bible, The Crack in Everything, and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She has taught feminist midrashic writing around the world for over a decade and is one of the foremost teachers in that field.
Dr. Ostriker is Professor Emerita in the English department at Rutgers University. She is a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program. Dr. Ostriker has performed her poetry at many universities and festivals in this country and abroad in England, Australia, Japan, Italy and Israel. Her work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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Rabbi Rayzel Raphael
Rabbi Rayzel Raphael brings a rich background in spirituality and ritual, feminism, and music to Judaism. She has worked for Hillel for 15 years and is now the Rabbi at Leyv Ha-Ir Reconstructionist Congregation in Philadelphia. Rabbi
Raphael is a gifted teacher who explores biblical women and the archetypes of the Divine feminine, as well as many other topics. She is a songwriter/liturgist and sings with MIRAJ, an a cappella trio. Bible Babes A-beltin' is her newest recording. Rabbi Raphael is also a ritual consultant for life cycle moments such as weddings, baby namings, and other sacred times.
Rabbi Raphael graduated from Brandeis University with a Masters in Contemporary Jewish Studies. She was awarded the Wexner Graduate Fellowship in 1989, and was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in1997. She received a scholarship in the Melton Senior Educator's Program at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988-89.
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Melissa Weintraub
Melissa Weintraub is a teacher of kabbalah and Jewish mysticism from a feminist and post-modern perspective. She has taught feminist theology and mysticism at Hebrew Union College and in many other venues. Weintraub is a peace activist who leads Jewish encounter groups from Israel to the Palestinian territories so that Jews and Palestinians can develop an understanding of one another. She is also a maker of ritual and a theologian working on new Jewish understandings of the Divine feminine.
Weintraub is a recipient of the Wexner Fellowship. She will be ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary in May 2006.