Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: The Jewish New Wave

Parenting as spiritual practice, the complexity of cultural appropriation, and the challenging work of intersectionality and feminism today. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is an award-winning author and writer. She was named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of ten “rabbis to watch,” by the Forward as one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis, and called a “wunderkund of Jewish feminism” by Publishers Weekly. She written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Time, and many other publications, and contributes regularly to The Washington Post and The Forward. She has been featured on NPR a number of times, as well as in The Atlantic, USA Today, NBC News, MTV News, Upworthy, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Al Jazeera America, Reese Witherspoon’s podcast How It Is, and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books; Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting (Flatiron Books), which a the National Jewish Book Award finalist and PJ Library Parents’ Choice selection; Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press), nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature and a Hadassah Book Club selection. Her other books include The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU Press), Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press), and, with Rabbi Elliot Dorff, three books for the Jewish Publication Society’s Jewish Choices/Jewish Voices series: Sex and Intimacy, War and National Security, and Social Justice. She is an avid Twitter user (@TheRaDR), with more than 80,000 followers. She worked as a freelance writer before her ordination from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in 2008, and has since served as rabbi and educator at Tufts and Northwestern Universities, for Hillel International, for the dialogue project Ask Big Questions and Avodah, an organization dedicated to creating leaders for economic justice.