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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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Israel Must Increase Its Advocacy — and Jews Must Continue Speaking Up
Trucks carrying aid move, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri
When will Israel answer the decades-long smear campaign against it? How can a nation known for breakthroughs in medicine, science, and agriculture — and home to the most ethical military and the Middle East’s only democracy — struggle with self-advocacy?
As a Soviet Jew raised in Moscow, I saw Israel as the guardian of my identity. After millennia of persecution and the Holocaust, Israel became a beacon of freedom and safety for the Jewish people. I excused Israel’s public-relations failures as the cost of survival. Surrounded by hostility and judged by the harshest standards, Israel focused on defending land, people, and principles — not narratives. Key conflicts shaped this posture — from 1948, 1967, and 1973, to the Intifadas, wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
The deepest wound is internal: too many Jews refuse to stand together against evil. Unity and principled advocacy are imperative. After three decades in New York, I’m devastated by Zohran Mamdani’s victory; he is a Social Democrat, an anti-Zionist, and an antisemite. Yet 33% of New York’s Jewish community voted for him. I cannot comprehend voting for a mayor who is an antisemite.
Since October 7, Israel has failed to communicate why it had to wage war on Hamas and prevent Hamas’ plan to destroy Israel. The opposing side advanced a narrative, amplified by the media and anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda — casting Palestinians as victims of “Israeli colonialism” and branding Israel’s war as a genocide.
Hamas massacred 1,200 people and took 251 hostages — and vowed to repeat the massacre again and again. Israel’s goals: return the hostages and eradicate Hamas to prevent future attacks. Yet the IDF and Netanyahu are cast as murderers, and a campaign to eliminate a terrorist organization is labeled as genocide.
Israel’s story is factual and moral. Israel’s war is not genocide; it targets Hamas terrorists, not Gazans. This is legitimate self-defense under international law. The IDF’s morality is rooted in courage, justice, and protection of the weak; Hamas attacks civilians and uses civilians as human shields, while the IDF takes extensive precautions to protect civilians. Hamas embeds its terrorists among civilians, seeking their deaths to feed a media campaign. The casualty story is distorted: the IDF estimates that two civilians are killed per Hamas terrorist — among the lowest ratios in recent warfare. Civilian deaths, tragic in any war, do not constitute genocide. If Israel sought genocide, the toll would be vastly higher.
The world must know that Hamas obstructs aid — attacking workers, firing on distribution sites, and blocking aid — while the IDF strains to deliver it. These tactics sow chaos and spawn false reports blaming the IDF for deaths and famine, even as Hamas hoards fuel and medical supplies.
Israel cites extensive aid deliveries, daily pauses, secure corridors, and controlled entry to challenge famine assessments. This data gets scant media coverage. Israel hasn’t failed deliberately; it neglected to adjust to the change in political choreography.
Israel must remind its people of their history, and clarify that it fights to defends all Jews, not only Israelis. It should use the media to change the narrative about the Middle East, ground claims in data, and pair them with images of Israeli victims from October 7.
An antisemitic mob gathered outside a Manhattan synagogue, chanting “Death to the IDF,” “Death to Israel,” and “We need to make them scared,” during a Nefesh B’Nefesh event. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani issued a perfunctory note “discouraging the language,” then effectively blamed the synagogue, claiming that houses of worship must be free from intimidation and should not promote activities that “violate international law.”
First of all, promoting the rights of Jews to live in Israel does not violate international law (unless you believe Israel shouldn’t exist, which Mamdani does). Second, what about the rights and freedom of the congregants? Mamdani’s posture is as hollow as Putin’s desire for peace. Emboldened by elected antisemitic leadership, the mobs blur protest, hate, and violence.
Yet fault also lies with us Jews: freedom is our faith’s core, and with that, comes responsibility. Instead of urging Israel to communicate the facts, too many Jews stayed passive — or boosted Zohran Mamdani, who believes Israel, not Hamas, is responsible for the massacres.
“Am Yisrael Chai!” is a Jewish cry of an uncompromising will to live — “The People of Israel live.” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise proclaimed it in 1933 in defiance of Hitler; survivors heard it after Bergen-Belsen’s liberation; Shlomo Carlebach made it the anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement. Across the years, the cry affirms Jewish resilience and frames a narrative: “The People of Israel live.” Our story starts and ends with this cry. In between, lie the facts — and without facts, history turns to fiction and democracies become dictatorships.
Anya Gillinson is an immigration lawyer and author of the new memoir, Dreaming in Russian. She lives in New York City. More at www.anyagillinson.com.
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UK Police Plan Tougher Action Against Antisemitic Chants and Protests
A forensic technician and police officers work at the scene after a man drove a car into pedestrians and stabbed a security guard in an attack at a synagogue where worshippers were marking Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, according to the British police, in north Manchester, Britain, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Phil Noble
British police on Wednesday said they would take tougher action against people who use placards and chants to target the Jewish community, saying recent violent incidents had changed the context around such protests.
The move comes days after 15 people died in a mass shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach targeting an event for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and following an attack at a synagogue in Manchester in northern England in October in which two Jewish worshippers were killed.
“We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as ‘globalize the intifada’ and those using it at future protests or in a targeted way should expect the Met and GMP to take action,” London’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police said in a joint statement.
“Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed – words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests.”
Jewish groups have been calling for tougher action over the language used at pro-Palestinian protests, while the Community Security Trust (CST), which works to provide security to protect British Jews, says antisemitic incidents have been soaring in Britain.
“Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious,” Dave Rich, the CST’s director of policy, wrote this week.
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Israeli NBA Player Deni Avdija Wishes ‘Happy Hanukkah’ After Star Performance in Win for Portland Trail Blazers
Dec 3, 2025; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Portland Trail Blazers forward Deni Avdija (8) drives between Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell (45) and forward De’Andre Hunter (12) in the fourth quarter at Rocket Arena. Mandatory Photo: David Richard-Imagn Images
Israeli NBA player Deni Avdija clocked in 26 points, seven rebounds, eight assists, and one steal in 33 minutes during the Portland Trail Blazers’ 136-131 home win over the Golden State Warriors on Sunday.
Avdija put on a strong performance during the game, which took place on the first night of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. In the final minutes of the game, Avdija had two assists, a basket, foul move against Draymond Green, and hit free throws.
At the end of the game, Avdiya posted an Instagram Story celebrating his team’s win with the caption “Happy Hanukkah to everyone!” The post was reshared by the official Instagram account for the Portland Trail Blazers.
Jeremy Grant and Shaydon Sharp scored 35 points each during the game. Sunday was the third time this season that Avdija, Grant, and Sharp each scored over 25 points.
Avdija, the 24-year-old forward and former Maccabi Tel Aviv player, has scored in double digits in every game during the season and at least 16 points in nine straight games, according to CBS Sports.