Lori Hope Lefkovitz

Who is Lori Hope Lefkovitz?

Lori Hope Lefkovitz is the Ruderman Professor and Director of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University and founding director of Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women and Gender Studies, the first such center at a rabbinical seminary.

A graduate of Brandeis University, Lefkovitz received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University and was a recipient of a Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship in women's studies, a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at Hebrew University, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, and in 2004, a Fulbright Professorship at Hebrew University. She was previously an Associate Professor at Kenyon College.

Among the courses she teaches or has taught at RRC are: Literary Approaches to Bible; Bible and the Feminist Imagination; Writing for the Rabbinate; Gender and Judaism; Queering Jewish Studies; Jewish Literature.

Since Kolot's founding in 1996, Lefkovitz has convened a landmark conference, together with the Renfrew Center, on Food, Body Image & Judaism, which examined eating disorders; established the Rosh Hodesh: “It’s a girl thing!” program, that has popularly been adopted across the country; and, together with Ma’yan, co-founded Ritualwell.org, a Web site for contemporary Jewish ritual now maintained exclusively by Kolot, with Lefkovitz its Executive Editor. Through a joint initiative, she established a program with Temple University awarding a certificate in Jewish Women's Studies.