She has lectured at a number of colleges and universities, including Columbia, UPenn, Princeton and Swarthmore and is an active public intellectual who writes for mainstream publications and frequently speaks at rallies and on panels in the Philadelphia region and beyond. She wrote “Finding Our Past: A Lesbian Interpretation of the Book of Ruth,” which was included in Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, edited by J. She has also edited several volumes and published articles on a wide range of topics including sexuality in Judaism, the definition of who is Jewish and who is not, gay liberation theology, Alvin Dark, and Jackie Robinson. Her book on that topic, Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball, was published by Oxford University Press. Thereafter she served in several capacities at Temple University: as Director of Adult Programs, Director of the Program in Women's Studies, and finally a faculty member in the departments of religion and women's studies.Īlpert's research has focused on explaining and expounding the Reconstructionist tradition, the place of gays and lesbians in Jewish religious history and she is currently writing on the relationships between Jews, blacks and sports during the years 1930-1950. During this time she also taught courses in Holocaust Studies at Rutgers University, and she was the Dean of Students at the RRC until 1987. She divorced her husband Joel Alpert and became partners with Christie Balka. In this capacity she was among a handful of the first generation of congregational women rabbis.

CareerĪfter graduation, Alpert worked on a contractual basis with a number of synagogues in the U.S. Her thinking about many of these issues was shaped by her teachers, who included Elaine Pagels and Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Her specialization is in American and especially Jewish American religious history, and she focuses on issues related to gender, sexuality and race. in religion at Temple University and her Rabbinical training at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended Erasmus Hall High School and Barnard College before getting her Ph.D. Rebecca Alpert was born in Brooklyn, New York to Sylvia and Irving Trachtenberg.

Lesbian Rabbis by Rebecca T. Alpert