Rachel Adler

Who is Rachel Adler?

Rachel Adler is professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College, at the Los Angeles campus. Adler was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics.

In 1971, she published an article entitled "The Jew Who Wasn't There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman," in Davka magazine. This article was considered by historian Paula Hyman as one of the founding influences of the Jewish feminist movement.

In 1972 she published an article entitled "Tum'ah and Toharah: Ends and Beginnings." In this article she argued that the ritual immersion of a niddah in a mikveh did not “oppress or denigrate women.” Instead, she argued, such immersion constituted a ritual reenactment of “death and resurrection” that was actually “equally accessible to men and women.” However, she eventually renounced this position. In her essay “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity”, published in Tikkun in 1993, she wrote “purity and impurity do not constitute a cycle through which all members of society pass, as I argued in my [1972] essay. Instead, impurity and purity define a class system in which the most impure people are women.”