Contributors to This Issue

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander received her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Yale University in 1998 and currently teaches at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition, is expected out soon from Cambridge University Press. She is now working on a new book, "Between Man and Woman: The Emergence of Gender in Rabbinic Law."

J.H. (Yossi) Chajes (Ph.D., Yale University 1999) is Lecturer in Medieval Jewish History in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. A former Fulbright, Wexner, and Hartman Fellow, Chajes has also served as Visiting Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) was a Koret Jewish History Book Award finalist.

Judith A. Kates, Professor of Jewish Women's Studies at Hebrew College, Newton, MA, teaches Tanakh and Jewish biblical commentary in Hebrew College's new Rabbinical School. She also teaches in many programs of adult learning in the Boston area. She edited (with Gail Twersky Reimer) Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story (1994) and Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days (1997), and she has a published articles and chapters on biblical women and midrash.

Debra Renee Kaufman is Professor of Sociology and Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, where she was the founder of Women's Studies and its Director for the first ten years and has just stepped down as Director of Jewish Studies. She is the author of Rachel's Daughters (Rutgers University Press, 1991), and her co-edited book with Gerry Herman, David Phillips, and James Ross, The Media, The Academy and the Law: Assessing the Truth from the Protocols of Zion to Holocaust Denial, will be published this fall by Vallentine Mitchell (London–Portland, OR).

Nitza Keren wrote her dissertation on "The Feminine Mark: Feminine Poetics, Its Characteristics, and Its Embodiments in Contemporary Israeli Women's Writing: Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Hanna Bat-Shahar, Savion Liebrecht, Dorit Peleg, Ronit Matalon, Michal Govrin, Rivka Rass, Snait Giss" (Bar Ilan University, 2005). She received the first Ph.D. given by the Interdisciplinary Program in Gender Studies at Bar Ilan University. Her principal research areas are women's writing, and Hebrew literature and poetics.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is a poet in a private master class with Mary Stewart Hammond and has also studied with Minnie Bruce Pratt. Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Lilith, PoetryNZ, Kerem, CrossCurrents, MSN Religion Forum, and Voices Israel, among others, and is forthcoming in Confrontation, Main Street Rag, Jewish Women's Literary Annual, Sambatyon, and Mimaamakim. She was awarded honorable mention in the Judah Magnes Museum "Poetry on the Jewish Experience" contest in 1999 and was a finalist in the 2004 Small Poetry Press Chapbook contest. She is currently completing a poetry manuscript about being a daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Irit Koren uses her study of the intersection of gender and religion as an exegetical lens through which to approach and explicate Jewish texts and society. She is currently writing her dissertation in Gender Studies at Bar Ilan University, on the ways in which religious women resist and challenge the Orthodox wedding ritual. Koren's first book, Closet within a Closet: Stories of Orthodox Homosexuals (Hebrew), was published by Yediot Aharonot in 2003.

Lori Hope Lefkovitz holds the Gottesman Chair in Gender and Judaism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she directs Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies. Her books include Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 2001), coedited with Julia Epstein.

Judith Lewin received degrees in Comparative Literature from Brown University (B.A.) and Princeton University (Ph.D.). She has written on Ivanhoe in articles that appeared in Jewish Culture and History and ANQ. She is currently Assistant Professor...