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A digital Jewish library aims to add women’s Torah scholarship to its shelves — by helping them write it

(JTA) — Sefaria, the app that contains a digital collection of Jewish texts, has made everything from Genesis to an essay on Jewish law and gambling accessible at the tap of a finger.

But in one way, it’s the same as nearly every other Jewish library in history: Almost all the texts, from ancient times to the present, are written by men.

Now, Sefaria is hoping to chip away at that gender disparity by organizing and supporting a group of 20 women Torah scholars who are writing new books on Jewish texts.

“It’s relatively recent in the history of the Jewish people that women have had access to as full a Jewish education as men,” Sara Wolkenfeld, chief learning officer at Sefaria, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And so it’s even more recent that women are able to create those works.”

She added, “When I spoke to women about this, I discovered more and more that there were amazing women teaching Torah and many fewer women who were being encouraged to write books of Torah and really have the scaffolding in place to do that.”

The participants in the new program, called Word-by-Word, range from ordained clergy to academics and teachers. They have expertise in subjects ranging from early modern Jewish studies to Jewish thought and Talmud. Most of them are affiliated with Orthodox institutions or received Orthodox ordination. There are no non-Orthodox rabbis on the list.

Non-Orthodox women have been receiving rabbinic ordination for more than half a century, and recent decades have seen the proliferation of advanced Orthodox Jewish educational institutions geared toward women. In recent years, a growing number of Orthodox women have received ordination as clergy as well.

Word-by-Word aims to parlay their expertise into texts about topics such as Sephardic women’s halacha and rabbinic literature, villains of the Torah, and environmental ethics. Many but not all of the planned books will cover women’s issues: Rabbanit Leah Sarna aims to produce a pregnancy and childbirth guide for observant Jewish women and Gila Fine in Israel will explore the six women named in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, while Adina Blaustein in Ohio will produce a book rooted in the weekly Torah portion.

The program will provide the selected scholars with a support system that will help them put their knowledge down on paper — and, crucially, will pay them to do so. Cohort members will receive $6,000 per year for three years to support their work and will also get professional coaching, peer mentoring and networking opportunities with publishers and authors. The goal is for at least 15 to publish books by the program’s end, in 2026.

Erica Brown, director of the Sacks-Herenstein Center and vice provost for values and leadership at Yeshiva University, is leading the program with Wolkenfeld at Sefaria. (Sefaria’s CEO, Daniel Septimus, is on the board of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent organization.)

“Word-by-Word is the program I most needed when I started writing books about 15 years ago,” Brown said in a statement. “I needed help articulating my table of contents, editing myself down, structuring my ideas, writing a proposal, and then connecting to publishers,” she said. “There is a huge difference between knowing how to write and knowing how to publish a book.”

“Writing can also be lonely,” she added. “But it doesn’t have to be. With Word-by-Word, we’ll be creating a new Jewish sisterhood.”

The program builds on a sisterhood that has been growing for some time — of Orthodox women engaged in leading Jewish communities. Many of the cohort’s members are themselves graduates of, or teach at, Orthodox women’s educational institutions. At least seven of the 20 have spent time at Yeshivat Maharat, a liberal Orthodox institution that ordains women clergy. Others are affiliated with Orthodox campuses such as Yeshiva University in New York City or Bar-Ilan University outside of Tel Aviv, or Orthodox high schools or synagogues.

At least six of the cohort members are PhDs whose academic work mostly focuses on Jewish texts. Others are senior educators or hold prominent positions at Jewish educational institutions or nonprofits ranging from the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies to the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

The funders of Word-by-Word include three foundations that have supported Orthodox women’s learning and advancement: Micah Philanthropies, which allocated nearly a quarter of its grant money from 2021-2022 to Orthodox women’s leadership; the Walder Foundation, which has given grants to projects focused on Orthodox women’s education and leadership; and the Arev Fund, which has provided funding to Yeshivat Maharat, the educational center Nishmat, and other organizations geared toward Orthodox women.

Word-by-Word was open to women of all denominations and its organizers aimed for their advertising to reach a broad Jewish audience. But Wolkenfeld estimates that somewhere between 50% and 75% of the 122 women who applied were, judging from the applicants’ resumes, “plausibly Orthodox.” She also said the cohort’s denominational breakdown may have been a result of the program call for projects that closely analyzed Jewish texts.

“We got a lot of applications that were not actually close analysis of Jewish texts, but rather more, like, writing about themes in Jewish texts,” Wolkenfeld said. “To have a fellowship that was even more diverse, we probably would have needed to have different criteria.”

A predecessor to Word-by-Word launched in 2021, when Sefaria and Yeshivat Maharat partnered to create a writing fellowship for Jewish women scholars. Participants received training and, at the program’s conclusion, each presented a 3,000-word piece at a virtual event. The 14 scholars and rabbis who participated in that program included graduates of Orthodox, Conservative and transdenominational rabbinical schools.

Pamela Barmash, a Conservative rabbi and a professor of Hebrew Bible at Washington University in St. Louis, who is not involved in Word-by-Word, said the absence of non-Orthodox rabbis means “the full orchestra of voices that make up the Jewish community is not there.”

“We only see part of the colors in the spectrum,” she said. “We only see pieces of the Jewish world and we’re missing much of the vitality and creativity and initiative that is found in the rest of the Jewish world.”

Wolkenfeld is an alumna of several Jewish educational institutions and said she feels the increasing gender diversity she sees in institutions of Torah learning has been a boon. Soon, she hopes, some of the women she has studied with will see their names on those institutions’ bookshelves.

“As opposed to where we were, let’s say, 20 years ago,” she said, “I think we now have had the chance to start reaping the benefits of what happens when you have both men and women involved in learning Torah and teaching Torah and disseminating Torah.”

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The post A digital Jewish library aims to add women’s Torah scholarship to its shelves — by helping them write it appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Outrage First, Facts Later: Jerusalem’s Palm Sunday Story

Pope Leo XIV delivers a homily during the Palm Sunday Mass in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican, March 29, 2026. REUTERS/Francesco Fotia

News that Israeli police had blocked Latin Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday spread rapidly across social media this week.

The reaction was swift and severe, with Israel accused of restricting Christian worship and violating religious freedom at one of Christianity’s holiest sites.

But much of the outrage was missing key facts.

Israeli police, along with the Prime Minister and President, said the measures were driven by security concerns at Jerusalem’s holy sites during wartime.

With Iranian missile fire ongoing and fragments already landing near religious locations, authorities cited the risk of mass casualties in an area with limited shelter and difficult emergency access.

The decision, they said, was about protecting both the cardinal and worshippers.

What was also largely overlooked is that the situation was quickly resolved.

Following coordination between Israeli authorities and the Catholic Patriarchate, an agreement was reached allowing prayer under agreed limitations, and access was restored.

There is room to criticize what was, at best, a clumsily handled situation that should have been resolved before escalating publicly. But there was no evidence of malice — only an attempt to enforce safety regulations under wartime conditions.

That context, however, was almost entirely absent from the viral narrative.

Pro-Palestinian accounts on X portrayed the incident as a deliberate act against Christians. Some framed it as persecution; others as proof of systematic religious discrimination.

One widely shared post by Quds News Network claimed Israel had prevented the cardinal from entering the church with no reason given, omitting any reference to security measures or crowd control, and reinforcing the perception of deliberate obstruction.

In another post, Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha — previously criticized for disparaging Israeli hostages in Gaza — cast the incident as part of a broader pattern of restrictions on worship, again without mentioning the security rationale cited by Israeli authorities.

Susan Abulhawa went further, using the incident to promote inflammatory rhetoric about “parasitic Jewish supremacists,” falsely claiming that Jews were granted unrestricted access while Christians and Muslims were barred.

Other commentators, including Ethan Levins, Carrie Prejean, and longtime Israel critic Mehdi Hasan, echoed similar claims — all reinforcing the same stripped-down narrative: denial of access, devoid of context.

Missing from much of the online reaction was the perspective of Cardinal Pizzaballa himself. He stated that he was treated with politeness and emphasized the importance of respectful dialogue moving forward.

In reality, Israel faced a difficult choice: allow unrestricted access during Holy Week amid an active war and credible security threats, or impose temporary limitations and face international backlash.

Either option carried consequences. Had a mass casualty event occurred, the criticism would likely have been far more severe.

This is the nature of a lose-lose scenario.

Events in Jerusalem, particularly around religious sites, do not unfold in a vacuum. They are shaped by security realities, historical sensitivities, and the challenge of balancing competing religious claims.

Reducing such incidents to a single viral image strips away that complexity.

The Palm Sunday episode is a case study in how quickly a misleading narrative can take hold when context is omitted, and how rarely subsequent clarifications receive the same attention as the initial outrage.

In the end, the situation was resolved not through outrage, but through dialogue.

That, too, is part of the story.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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The Media Ignores Iran’s Crimes, Because It Wants to See the Regime Prevail

Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Start with three facts from this past week.

Not rumors. Not slogans. Not social media noise.

Facts — reported in mainstream outlets, documented by international human rights bodies, and, in part, reflected in the regime’s own conduct and admissions.

First, a 19-year-old wrestler — Navid Afkari — was executed by the Iranian regime after a trial widely condemned by international observers. Hung. Killed. His crime: protesting.

Second, officials tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) advancing frameworks where children as young as 12 can be integrated into war-support roles — patrols, logistics, internal enforcement. Not speculation. Not anonymous leaks. Positions reflected in both external reporting and Iranian media.

Third, multiple independent investigations — and mainstream media reports — documenting the systematic use of rape and sexual violence by the IRGC and Basij against detainees, particularly protesters, as a tool of repression.

Stop there.

You don’t need embellishment. You don’t need a fourth example. You don’t need a roundtable parsing “context.” What you need is to understand what kind of regime produces all three of these facts consistently, predictably, and without apology.

Because in the Islamic Republic of Iran, these are not aberrations. They are not excesses at the margins of an otherwise functioning system. They are the system.

Authoritarian systems do not need to announce what they are. They demonstrate it. Not in their slogans — which are often framed, for many Western audiences, in the language of justice and resistance — but in what they do to people, particularly their own citizens.

For 47+ years under this Iranian regime, the pattern is direct and repeatable. That is not hyperbole or metaphor. It is a description of how the Iranian regime operates.

And yet — and this is where the second scandal should begin — this regime still receives the benefit of the doubt, if not outright support, in significant parts of Western discourse.

Watch almost any show on MSNBC or CNN and you can hear it happen in real time.

The language shifts. It hedges. Or it flips into outright advocacy.

Iran becomes “complicated.”
The regime becomes “reactive.”

Its brutality is sometimes acknowledged, but immediately diluted with qualifiers — history, geopolitics, grievance. Explanations that are rarely extended to democratic states defending themselves.

And then there is the next tier — those who go further and actively sanitize what is happening as they also effectively cheerlead for this regime in its current war against America, Israel, and every moderate Sunni Arab state in the region.

They do not talk about the crimes happening in Iran, because those facts are disqualifying.

Once stated plainly, without euphemism or ideological filtering, these facts collapse the narrative that these groups rely on to excuse or deflect from the regime’s conduct.

You cannot claim moral seriousness or concern for human rights and dignity while excusing executions of protesters, the integration of children into state security structures, and the systematic use of sexual violence as a tool of repression.

You can argue politics. You can criticize Israel. You can debate foreign policy or military strategy.

But if you ignore or minimize these facts about the Iranian regime, you are not making an argument tied to human rights. You are abandoning it.

There is a sad, long and well-documented history of this kind of intellectual evasion and duplicity.

In the 1930s, Western journalists like Walter Duranty downplayed or denied Stalin’s famine in Ukraine while millions died. Soviet show trials and purges were explained away as internal necessities. In Mao’s China, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were rationalized or ignored by sympathetic observers even as tens of millions perished. Later, Pol Pot’s Cambodia was dismissed by some Western voices as exaggerated propaganda until the killing fields could no longer be concealed.

Evidence is available. Documentation exists. But it is discounted, reframed, or ignored because it conflicts with a preferred political narrative.

If you excuse or downplay executions after sham trials, as well as these other crimes, you are providing political cover for a regime routinely and regularly engaged in brutality and systematic repression.

Large parts of the anti-Israel, self-described “pro-Palestinian” movement are not engaged in a human rights campaign. They are engaged in a selective political project that ignores abuse when it is inconvenient and amplifies (and lies about) it when it is useful. If human rights were the standard, the Iranian regime would be at the center of their outrage. It isn’t.

And that tells you everything you need to know.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.

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An American Student’s View From Israel: The First Day of My First War

A drone view shows a damage in a residential neighborhood, following a night of Iranian missile strikes which injured dozens of Israelis, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Dimona, southern Israel, March 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Roei Kastro

On February 28, 2026, at 8:15 AM, I was woken up by a very unique alarm clock. Israel’s Home Front Command app had suddenly replaced Google and Gemini as the most invaluable tool I had.

Surprise is not the right word for what I felt at that moment, because we had all been anticipating a war for the past month.

I bolted awake in my bed and looked at my roommates in disbelief. “Yup, that’s a siren,” said one of them. I frantically threw on my shoes and ran to the bomb shelter, feeling the adrenaline kicking in.

The bomb shelter was crammed with people, as we were on a trip to Safed at the time, a town in Israel’s North, famous for its Jewish mystics and beautiful views. Our counselors attempted to count us off as Israelis around us were shouting at and through each other, both on the phone and in person.

My journey to Israel began in March of last year, when I decided to apply to the Alexander Muss High School, a semester abroad program for North American students in Israel. This program integrates the students’ schoolwork from home with a travel schedule around Israel and a rich educational curriculum to connect kids with Jewish history and modern Israel.

It is an amazing program that allows students to learn extensively about Israel and its culture, something that I, as a kid from the Bay Area, do not get.

All of our original plans to explore Safed that day were scrapped. We were given 15 minutes to pack up our things and get on the bus to go back to campus in Hod HaSharon, in central Israel. What was supposed to be an hour and a half ride turned into three; it was also the most surreal bus ride of my life.

Ten minutes into the drive, a siren rang. We drove into a tunnel and were told to crouch down in the aisle of the bus and cover our heads and necks. Something I had seen Israelis do for years on the news was now a reality for me.

After some time, we were back on the road, but not for long.

After several more sirens, stops, and crouching down in the bus, we finally made it back to campus. We did not get a break for long. Soon we were greeted by another round of sirens, and back into the bomb shelter we went.

There were a total of twenty-seven sirens that day. The entire day was spent in the bomb shelter. During the brief couple of minutes between rounds that we had, we set objectives for what was to be accomplished, whether it be grabbing food, water, or plugging in a portable charger that was dead at the most opportune time. Many attempted, unsuccessfully, to take showers, but were interrupted by sirens. It did not feel frightening, but it did feel very strange.

This truly gave me the full Israeli experience.

Normal, everyday tasks were done under the constant stress of whether they would be interrupted by a siren. During a particularly intense day of rocket fire, I prepared baggy clothes to throw on in case of a siren while showering. Meals were frequently interrupted. What we in the Bay Area take for granted is not the case for Israelis now. Multiple times a day, we are forced to drop whatever we are doing and run to the shelter.

And that’s assuming Israel’s defenses work, and bomb shelters will protect us. But sometimes they won’t.

This war has provided me with an unparalleled experience, where, for the first time, I truly understand what being part of the Israeli community means, both in peace and in war.

These moments that now make up everyday life, whether positive or not, have brought my classmates and me together.

In the past month, I have learned a lot, and I have experienced a real war, something one never looks forward to.

I fully understood who I was when, under that tunnel where the bus stopped to hide from the missiles, we formed a big circle and began singing Hatikva, Israel’s anthem. That was a moment of unity and resiliency that I, as an American and a Jew, will never forget.

Sheina Stesin is a high schooler from the Bay Area, and is currently on a study abroad program in Israel.

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