Event details

As of 2025, 100 Orthodox Jewish women have been ordained at Yeshivat Maharat in the Bronx. Hundreds more women have studied Talmud at advanced levels and received leadership training at seminaries in the U.S and Israel/Palestine. Women who graduate from these programs work in communities, schools, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations in Europe, North America, Israel/Palestine, and Australia. Orthodox rabbinic leaders have expressed strong opposition to women serving as rabbis, but a transnational network of Orthodox feminist rabbis, teachers, students, donors, and institutions has cultivated and sustained this burgeoning movement. In this talk, Professor Raucher will offer an overview of this transnational network and argue that the wide variety of rabbinic identities among Orthodox women today is the result of a movement that is situated in multiple religious and political contexts.

Michal Raucher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research focuses on reproduction, religious authority, and gender among Jews in America and Israel/Palestine. Raucher is the author of “Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women” (Indiana, 2020). Her second book, The New Rabbis, an ethnography of Orthodox women rabbis, is under contract with NYU Press. Dr. Raucher is a PI on two studies exploring the intersection of religious identity and abortion in America. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and a past president of the Society of Jewish Ethics.