Biography

A graduate of the Matan’s M.A. Program in Tanakh, Rachel Adelman went on to complete her PhD in Hebrew Literature (with a specialty in midrash) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  In 2007/8,  she was the Ray D. Wolfe post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and last year was a visiting assistant professor at Miami University, in Ohio.   She teaches Tanakh and Midrash at Matan (the Sadie Rennert Women’s Institute for Torah Study), in Jerusalem, and lectures widely in North America and England.  In the fall of 2009, her first book — The Return of the Repressed:  Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha — was published by Brill. 

Her poems have been published in European Judaism, Kerem, and Commentary, and her translations in Modern Hebrew Literature.  She recently received a grant from the Hadassah–Brandeis Institute to complete her first book of creative writing:  A Voice from the End of the World (Selected Poems and Midrashim).  The reviewers stated that this collection “will contribute a great deal to the fields of modern poetry, Jewish spirituality, Israeli literature, and feminist thought.”

This year, Rachel is working on her second academic book — The Female Ruse: Women’s Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible – as a Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She is also teaching Hebrew Bible, as an adjunct professor, at Hebrew College and the following year she will begin a tenure track position there.