Scholar in Residence

An accomplished author, lecturer, and storyteller, Rabbi Susan Grossman has written many articles on the role of women in Judaism. She co-edited with Orthodox activist Rivka Haut the anthology Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue (JPS, 1992) and advanced the inclusion of women’s voices in biblical commentary through her work as one of the editors of Etz Hayim and Torah Commentary (JPS, 2001). Her articles on women and Judaism are included in Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality (Brandeis, 2008), Women of the Wall (Jewish Lights, 2003), and Conservative Judaism (1992, 1995, 2005, 2013 forthcoming). Her most recent article on “Women Jewish Leaders” will be published in the forthcoming interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Leadership (Sage, 2013).

Rabbi Grossman has been identified by the New York Jewish Week and The Forward as one of the forty five Jewish leaders to watch in the twenty first century and honored as a Woman of the Year by Jewish Woman magazine in 2000, Rabbi Susan Grossman is a trailblazer for women in Judaism. She is one of the first women accepted for ordination as a Conservative rabbi and the first woman to lead congregations in Westchester, NY and Howard County, MD. She serves on the prestigious Committee for Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement through which she has been a prolific advocate for advancing women’s status in Jewish law, authoring responsa (rabbinic decisions) on women serving as witnesses and judges in Jewish law, ritual purity and the use of the mikveh, and the permissibility of “Partial Birth Abortion.” Before entering the rabbinate, she directed Holocaust programming for a national Jewish organization and worked for many years as a journalist and editor. She earned her doctorate in Ancient Judaism from Jewish Theological Seminary in 2009. Her dissertation Between Authority and Autonomy: Women in the Rabbinic Courts: A Study of Rabbinic Attitudes and Perceptions earned the interest of Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abelia. Rabbi Grossman has served as spiritual leader of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Maryland since 1997, where she currently lives with her husband David Boder and their son Yoni.

• Witches, Widows and Working Women: Women in the Talmudic Rabbinic Courts
• Jewish Views on Abortion and the Beginnning of Life
• Reading Women in the Bible and Jewish Law
• Jewish beliefs about Angels, Reincarnation, Resurrection, and the Afterlife.
• Jewish Storytelling