Sharon Cohen Anisfeld
As dean of Hebrew College's Rabbinical School, Sharon Cohen Anisfeld has struck a rare balance between overseeing the seminary as a whole and connecting with each of her students on a personal level. Anisfeld was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1990 and served for many years as a Hillel rabbi at Tufts, Yale, and Harvard. While at Yale, she organized their first women’s Seder in 1993, an annual event which eventually led to her editing the two-volume Women’s Seder Sourcebook and Women’s Passover Companion in 2002. In 1993 she began teaching on the summer faculty for the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in Israel, eventually becoming director of alumni initiatives for the program. She organized a groundbreaking national conference for Jewish women in 1997, held at Yale. After serving briefly as adjunct faculty at Hebrew College, she became dean of students in 2005 and dean of the rabbinical school in 2006. Honored as one of Newsweek’s 50 most influential rabbis from 2011–2013, Anisfeld has been praised for encouraging her diverse students to pursue their own visions of the rabbinate and bring Torah to bear on contemporary issues of personal meaning and social justice.
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Jewish Women's Archive. "Sharon Cohen Anisfeld." (Viewed on April 2, 2023) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/anisfeld-sharon>.