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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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Israel didn’t play in this World Cup. It has dominated the games anyway.
Sunday’s World Cup final has been billed as a contest between soccer powerhouses, colonizer versus colonized, and soccer’s past against its future. But the matchup of Spain and Argentina also represent two sides of today’s polarized global politics on Israel.
Under the leadership of President Javier Milei, Argentina has become one of Israel’s most steadfast supporters; the national team’s captain, Lionel Messi, a practicing Catholic, has made multiple trips to Israel.
Spain, on the other hand, styles itself as Israel’s most fervent Western adversary. It was among the first European countries to recognize a State of Palestine. There, too, politics have extended to the playing pitch: Spanish soccer prodigy Lamine Yamal — widely touted as Messi’s heir apparent — waved a Palestinian flag in May after his club team won the Spanish championship.
Their meeting in the final dovetails with a World Cup during which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often felt unavoidable — even as neither of those teams appeared.
Throughout the six-week tournament, fans, players and national sporting bodies have used the World Cup as a platform to criticize Israel, highlight the suffering of Palestinians and call for Israel’s expulsion by FIFA, the soccer federation that organizes international competition. Marketed as a symbol of and catalyst for international unity, the 2026 World Cup also offered a reminder of Israel’s unique power to divide — and demonstrated that the wars raging in the Middle East remain fixed in the global popular imagination.
Much of the attention on Israel could be attributed to the Egyptian team, whose coach, Hossam Hassan, repeatedly foregrounded the Palestinian cause during his press conferences as the team forged into the tournament’s knockout rounds.
After Hassan in an interview dedicated Egypt’s victory to the Palestinian people, he said, “May God grant them victory, and may God have mercy on their martyrs.”
His comments decrying the situation in Gaza made him a hero in the enclave, where a mural depicting Hassan was painted on the rubble of a destroyed building. After Egypt’s ouster by Argentina, the coach confronted a fan who seemed to be taunting him with an Israeli flag; the referee of that game faced antisemitic smears afterward.
It was one of several incidents involving flags, as the stands became proxy battlegrounds for the conflict. One man waving an Israeli flag at an Iran game in Los Angeles had it confiscated, seemingly for provocation; the only official explanation reportedly provided was “security reasons.” with no mention of Israel’s war with Iran. Palestinian flags have flown in the terraces no matter who was playing, but especially at games involving first-time contestant Jordan.
There were larger protest actions, too: Thousands of Bosnian fans chanted “Palestina” in the streets of Toronto on their way to a game against Canada; Morocco fans broke out into “Free Palestine” chants in Houston. (There was a rumor that Morocco’s pro-Israel king, Mohammed VI, had a top player pulled from the team for waving a Palestinian flag on the pitch earlier this year.)
As the drama played out on fields across North America and in the concourses, a campaign to get Israel banned over the war from international soccer competition, which dates to 2024, continued apace. The national soccer federation of Norway, which became a tournament darling during the country’s first-ever run to the quarterfinals, joined several Middle Eastern nations in calls for Israel’s ouster from World Cup organizer FIFA and European soccer federation UEFA, citing those groups’ ejection of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
It was only logical that the relentless focus on Israel would culminate in Sunday’s final, where arguably the two biggest stars in the sport, Messi and Yamal, have played into the theme.
Messi’s appearances in Israel over the years on Barcelona and Argentina team trips — including a 2013 visit when he was photographed wearing a kippah at the Western Wall — have long made him a lightning rod for criticism and occasionally antisemitic slander from Arab leaders. Social media platforms filled with anti-Messi political sentiment in the last weeks as that photo recirculated.
The Argentine’s perceived Zionism — and if Yamal’s flag-waving is any indication, the apparent pro-Palestinian stance of Messi’s 19-year-old Spanish foil — mirrors the respective positions of the nations they play for. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called to end arms sales to Israel and for travel bans on “anyone who has participated in the genocide.” Spain was also the site of the most successful anti-Israel protest in sports last year, when protesters repeatedly ground the Spanish Vuelta to a halt over the presence of an Israeli team.
On the other hand, breaking with its longstanding support for Palestinians, Argentina opposed their bid for statehood last September at the United Nations. Milei, who has described himself as the “most Zionist president in the world,” has proposed renaming Palestine Street in Buenos Aires to “Bibas Family Street” after the murdered Israeli hostages.
This simple but potent dichotomy has determined Sunday’s rooting interest for many neutral fans, and plenty non-neutral ones. Pro-Palestinian social media activists have built the case for Spain by pitting Messi against Yamal. Israelis — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — have cited Milei’s support of Israel as a reason why they are rooting for Argentina. (To be sure, a lot of Israelis also just love the 39-year-old Messi because of what he can do with a soccer ball.)
The persistence of the conflict at the World Cup reflects the snowballing animus toward Israel in global cultural discourse. From Eurovision to literary societies to soccer, it’s all Israel all the time — an obsession that will feel disproportionate to the country’s supporters, but less so for Palestinians themselves. Saleem Al-Ashqar, a Palestinian goalkeeper, was shot dead by Israeli forces in Gaza last month; he is one of hundreds of Palestinian athletes who have been killed in the war that followed Oct. 7, 2023, according to Palestinian officials.
The international fixation on Israel at events like the World Cup is showing no signs of abating. The only thing that might dim the fervor is organizing bodies bowing to pressure to remove Israel — or the country itself altering course.
The post Israel didn’t play in this World Cup. It has dominated the games anyway. appeared first on The Forward.
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The real outrage of Rep. Ro Khanna’s West Bank visit
The settler violence that Rep. Ro Khanna experienced on his recent visit to the West Bank has made headlines. But what was most important about this trip wasn’t what his delegation — of which I was a part — went through, but rather the people we met in the West Bank and the truths they told.
It’s the daily humiliations and abuse they suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers. It’s the dehumanization they feel, and the silence they encounter when they try to tell their stories to the world.
I’m an Israeli-American, and I’ve known Khanna for a decade. During that time, we’ve often agonized together over how best to leverage United States foreign policy to achieve a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My family lived in Jerusalem for six generations; I emigrated to the U.S. 50 years ago. I am a peace activist who has spent the last two decades as a student of the conflict through my work with, among others, J Street and Combatants for Peace.
After years of deep engagement on these issues — including meetings with the families of multiple Israeli hostages and participation in several diplomatic trips to Israel — Khanna told me that he wanted to go see a part of the region that had been off limits with past delegations, and to truly understand the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. As the stories of settlement expansion, movement restrictions, settler terrorism and home demolitions in the West Bank have grown louder and more intense in recent months, Khanna wanted to hear about life under occupation from people on the ground.
He especially wanted to meet members of marginalized Palestinian Christian communities, as well as Palestinian Americans living in the West Bank. He didn’t want a tour where someone else controlled the agenda. He wanted to see and hear the occupation for himself.
As we discussed this plan, it was clear that it was essential that the trip be Palestinian-led — a low-profile personal trip, not a diplomatic entourage. Many Palestinians will not meet with tours led by pro-Israel organizations. (Khanna’s staff was in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem around the personal visit, despite Ambassador Mike Huckabee alleging otherwise.) Even a liberal Jewish organization like J Street, whose congressional delegations I’ve had the privilege of accompanying, is not welcome in many places in the West Bank.
The itinerary involved visits to three areas that would show life in distinct sections of the West Bank. We began by visiting Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala and meeting with their mayors. These are Christian communities with tourism economies. We heard about the water shortages with which they must contend, because Israel restricts the water supply to Palestinians. We heard about the Israeli settlement of Yatziv seizing Beit Sahour’s only remaining open land for its own construction. We heard about the difficulty of being a Christian minority in a place that is holy to all three religions.
From there we moved to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills. In Hebron, we visited streets that are open to Israeli Jews and tourists but closed to local Palestinians. We saw markets where violent Israeli settlers have thrown refuse, urine and sometimes even acid on Palestinians.
South of Hebron, we visited the village of Umm al-Khair, where we met Eid Suleiman, a Palestinian peace activist deported from San Francisco while on a humanitarian mission in 2025. His travel companion, his cousin Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by Israeli settler Yinon Levi — who was filmed at the scene and never charged — in the summer of 2025.
We mourned Hathaleen. And we saw the sheer terror that continues to be inflicted on this village by the neighboring Israeli settlements — the daily violence, harassment, destruction of property and land confiscation.
On the last day, we visited Turmus Ayya in the north.
It is an amazing place, populated mainly by Palestinian Americans. These families have kept their homes and their land for generations. We spent hours with Palestinian Americans who live 11 months of the year in the U.S. and spend one month tending to their homes and land in the West Bank. In the U.S., they are police officers, doctors, psychologists — equal participants in a pluralistic democracy. When they return to their homeland, their rights are stripped away within minutes of landing in Tel Aviv.
They told us how they undergo intense interrogations and delays at Ben Gurion Airport. How, at checkpoints, many endure abuse for not speaking Hebrew. They told us how their towns and homes have been damaged and their cars burned by mobs of marauding settlers. They told us they feel human in the U.S., but subhuman in Palestine.
These are the important points of this trip. These are the things we should be talking about. The finger-pointing and accusations that have followed Khanna’s accurate account of having our road blocked by settlers are a distraction.
The life stories we heard from Palestinians over three days were jarring. These truths will reverberate in my mind for years, long after the finger-pointing is over.
The post The real outrage of Rep. Ro Khanna’s West Bank visit appeared first on The Forward.
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More Democrats than ever are voting against aid to Israel. That could actually be good for Israel
Israel is losing Democratic support in the same way a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.”
When 103 House Democrats voted for a resolution that would eliminate United States aid to Israel yesterday — that was the “suddenly.” Even though the resolution didn’t pass, what seemed unimaginable on a few years ago now, after a period of gradual change, looks inevitable. When the current $38-billion weapons aid agreement between the U.S. and Israel winds down in 2028, the next one will involve what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called “a major reset” in the relationship.
And you know what? It’s long overdue. This shocking, historic vote is an opportunity to redefine the U.S.-Israel relationship in a way that benefits the U.S., Israel, Palestinians and the region.
Proponents have always framed U.S. aid to Israel as a win-win. We give them money — most of which has to be spent on American-made weapons — and in exchange Israel serves as a kind of land-based battleship in the Middle East. It looks out for American interests in a volatile region.
But increasingly, Americans are failing to see the value in that bargain. A recent poll found that 48% of Americans feel the U.S. is too supportive of Israel. At least among young people, this antipathy doesn’t just exist on the left: 53% of Republicans under age 45 oppose renewing the current aid agreement.
The fact of Israel’s booming economy, driven by the high tech and weapons industries that make it a valuable U.S. partner, has fueled that opposition. Why, a growing number of Americans ask, should our tax dollars fund a country that ranks 24th in median adult wealth according to a newly released USB survey — while the U.S. itself ranks 28th?
But what opponents mostly object to is Israeli government policy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has cashed American checks and carried on with policies in Gaza and the West Bank that most Americans — including most American Jews — reject. What defenders have long asserted is a mutually beneficial arrangement increasingly feels more like a teenager with a credit card and a bad attitude.
A better approach, the “reset” Jeffries speaks of, would adjust the relationship from one of parent and child to one of peers and partners.
Ensuring Israel’s long term security would continue to be a key goal of that partnership. The U.S. might stop funding Israeli weapons purchases, but it could still sell Israel defensive systems.
But the security of Palestinians and other Israeli neighbors would also be key. The U.S. ought to consider defense guarantees to Israel and certain neighbors, including the Gulf States and even, perhaps, a reformed Syria. Those guarantees should come with sanctions if any government misuses American-made weapons. Security also means funding humanitarian aid that is attached to rooting out extremism and promoting freedom and self-determination.
Such a reset could make Israel itself stronger: less reliant on the whims of U.S. foreign and domestic policy; better able to diversify its sourcing and sale of weapons; and a key player in a regional peace, which includes the Palestinians. All of those changes could help bring true security.
These outcomes may seem aspirational. But it’s not like the old and now defunct patterns of aid were bringing Israelis the security they need. Democrats and Republicans, by listening to changing public opinion, have a chance to establish a new relationship rooted in a new vision.
Make no mistake, this vision will not satisfy the hardcore anti-Israel crowd on either side of the aisle. They want no aid and no partnership. They want to boycott Israeli products, artists and academics and arrest Israeli leaders. Their solution is the dissolution of the Israeli state.
Some of the Democrats who voted for the resolution no doubt belong in this category — among them the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who was the sole House member to vote “nay” on a Nov. 2023 resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist.
But many Democrats who voted for the Wednesday resolution said they did so despite their ongoing support for Israel, as a way to lodge their dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s policies.
“We simply cannot continue to condone Netanyahu’s actions that are against our moral conscience and our own national security interests by perpetuating the status quo,” said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who has a long record of support for Israel.
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, also of Massachusetts, voted for the bill, but said it “should not impair the state of Israel’s right to defend itself against the atrocities of the terrorist regimes that threaten it.”
Both Auchincloss and Moulton pointed out the bill’s flaws, among them that it would deny Israel purely defensive weapons systems, as well as humanitarian aid that also serves Palestinians.
But if Israel’s sensible supporters can, once the current agreement expires, put one in place that allows for defensive weapons and humanitarian aid, they’ll be on the way to promoting a more effective partnership than that we have now. Doing so could dampen the extremes both here and in Israel. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The post More Democrats than ever are voting against aid to Israel. That could actually be good for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
