"A Different Way to Relate": Curiosity and Risk in Feminist Teaching and Scholarship

Rebecca T. Alpert

Heather R. White

Rebecca T. Alpert is a professor of religion and an affiliate faculty in the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies program at Temple University, where she also currently serves as the senior associate dean of Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts. Alpert is a scholar of American religious history and a pathbreaking Reconstructionist rabbi. She was ordained in 1976 as one the first female rabbis and was also among the first group of "out" lesbian and gay rabbis in the Reconstructionist movement, a development that she chronicles in her award-winning book Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (1997) and coedited volume (with Sue Elwell and Shirley Idelson) Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation (2001). Alpert has continued to write and speak as a public scholar, queer feminist, and rabbi in a self-consciously progressive tradition; her work addresses Reconstructionist approaches to tradition; critical antiracism, marriage and sexual ethics, and Zionism and Palestinian solidarity, among many other issues. Alpert's scholarship has also influentially shaped the academic subfield of religion and sports. Her historical monograph Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (2011) received the Robert Peterson award for Best Book in Negro League History and was featured in the National Jewish History Museum's 2014 exhibition Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American. Alpert's work in this field also includes another award-winning book, Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies (2015) as well as a forthcoming coedited volume (with Art Remillard), titled "Gods, Games, and Globalization." Alpert is also an award-winning teacher and mentor who has written critically and insightfully about the challenges of the classroom.¹

I met Alpert in 2004, when I was a graduate student writing a dissertation in LGBT religious studies. She visited my campus to give a lecture on the history of Jewish lesbian feminism. I knew her then as the author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate, a book that influentially helped me envision how to write in the field of LGBTQ history at a moment when the scholarly bibliography on this topic was still sparse. In the years since, I have come to know her as a generous scholar and mentor, a person whose practical, even-keeled candor is cut with equal parts of empathy and humor. I am one of many young scholars whom Alpert has taken by the elbow for a postdissertation lap through the American Academy of Religion (AAR)/Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) book exhibit in order to introduce us and our work to academic publishers. I also witnessed Alpert's transformative pedagogy at the Summer Institute (a week-long program for graduate students working in religion, theology, and queer studies), where I participated as a mentor.² It was thus with great delight that I accepted the request to interview Alpert for JFSR. The interview below began as an informal conversation, where we agreed to focus on pedagogy, and then expanded into broader reflection on the shaping influence of teachers on Alpert's life and work.

Heather:

What experiences of learning or of being a student have most shaped your sense of your role in the classroom and with your students?

Rebecca:

This is actually the same question I ask on the first day of class when I teach new graduate students about the importance of reflective teaching. Many of us who have decided to work in higher education have done so because we loved learning and being in the classroom, and it's important to remember who inspired us. So, I can certainly tell you about my favorite teachers:

Mrs. Farrar, my fifth-grade teacher, who opened up new worlds to me in the 1950s by having us learn about, research, and meet leading figures in the African American world like Crispus Attucks, Mary McCloud Bethune, Jacob Lawrence, and Kwame Nkrumah...