Rabbis and rabbinical students in the United States are increasingly diverse, with rising numbers of women and LGBTQ people in clergy roles and in the pipeline feeding rabbinical schools, according to an Associated Press report. Women rabbis who entered the field decades ago described how unusual their presence was early on, while younger clergy and students said they see different possibilities now in liberal Jewish communities.
Rabbi Laura Geller, rabbi emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, California, recalled that when she was among a class of 30 people at Hebrew Union College, she was the only woman. Ordained in 1976, Geller said she became one of the first women rabbis in the Jewish Reform Movement and that, 50 years later, she feels proud of having helped break what she described as a glass ceiling and make room for change. “Women have transformed Judaism,” Geller said. “All the different kinds of movements have really noticed that Judaism needs to change because women’s voices were ignored in the past.”
Reform and Conservative Judaism, along with a growing nondenominational movement, permit women to serve as rabbis, unlike Orthodox branches where women generally do not hold the role. The AP report said the broader Jewish community has diversified as well, which helps explain why the rabbinate has followed. Janet Krasner Aronson, interim director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, said “a lot of people are entering the rabbinate and coming from very different backgrounds” and that many of them want to “shake things up a little bit.”
In New York City, Rebecca Weintraub, associate rabbi of B’nai Jeshurun, said she has seen that shift in liberal Jewish spaces. “For a lot of the younger generation, when they think of a rabbi, many of them, in their mind, the picture is a woman,” Weintraub said. “When I was growing up, when I would think of a rabbi, I’d think, man.” She described a change in expectations among younger people—one that has made it easier for younger clergy to be seen as leadership rather than exceptions.
Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, an organization that supports and trains Jewish spiritual leaders, said it commissioned new research documenting changes in both the rabbinate and its student pipeline. The report said Atra’s findings show men remain the majority of the more than 4,000-strong non-Ultra Orthodox U.S. rabbinate, but that women now represent a sizable minority. Atra’s research also found increases in LGBTQ people, Jews of color, and members of interfaith households, and it said those trends show up in non-Orthodox rabbinical schools, where women are in the majority. “We see an opening that did not exist for populations that once were not able to become rabbis,” said Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, Atra’s executive director. “We still don’t have parity of rabbis in the field, but we do see that we have many more women in the seminary.”
Sarah Livschitz, who moved from New Zealand to Los Angeles to enroll in Hebrew Union College, described entering a program where her student cohort was entirely female and said she plans to be ordained in May. “It’s normal to me that a woman would be a rabbi,” Livschitz said. “It’s a different world that I live in than people sort of 30 years ago, even 10 years ago.” Eleanor Steinman, senior rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom in Austin, Texas, viewed the diversification as a sign of thriving but said the challenge is that institutions are not always prepared. “The challenge to the rabbinate is that institutions, including synagogues, are not necessarily totally prepared for that diversity,” Steinman said.
Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum, director of congregational learning and programming at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, described feeling nervous during her final year in rabbinical school. “My Jewish experiences were pretty much all white,” Berenbaum said, recalling that when she was preparing to enter the job market she wondered, “Who’s going to hire a Black rabbi?” rather than asking “Who’s going to hire a woman rabbi?” Berenbaum was ordained in 2013 and said she later encountered the rabbinate’s patriarchal holdovers, including limited accommodation when she became a mother and a lack of shift in “rebbetzin” duties that are often handled by male rabbis’ wives. “Some of the earlier rabbis were really thrust into the deep patriarchy, where they were accepted but not really accepted, or accepted but forced to mold themselves to a masculine view of what is a rabbi,” Berenbaum said. “Whereas now women are able to just bring their full selves.” She said she is now one of three women rabbis in her congregation.
Others said mentorship from earlier generations helped make the pathway more navigable. Sarah Rockford, an LGBTQ+ student at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, said her experience had felt less like an exception. “My leadership is welcome, celebrated, and in some ways not treated as exceptional because of my gender or sexual orientation,” Rockford said. “We tend to forget how quickly things have changed.” Rockford credited strong female mentors, including Rabbi Rachel Isaacs of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, Maine, who became the first openly gay rabbi ordained by the Conservative seminary in 2011. “The Jewish community is far more diverse in every sense of the word than the Jewish community I was raised in,” Isaacs said.
Even as the AP report described the diversification as a sign of progress, it also underscored how demanding the rabbinate can be. Felicia Sol, the first woman to serve as senior rabbi in the nearly 200-year history of New York’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, said she loves teaching, pastoring, and leading services, including funerals. At the same time, she said the role can be frustrating because rabbis are pulled in many directions. “Rabbis are being pulled in so many directions and pressured in so many ways that it’s very frustrating and hard,” Sol said. The report also cited Atra’s research describing emotional exhaustion and financial stress that can come with congregational leadership during periods of political division and heightened tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
Isaacs said the “biggest struggle is burnout,” adding that the boundary between personal and professional life can be hard to manage. “No matter how hard you try, the line or the boundary between the personal and the professional is extraordinarily fuzzy, which makes it very hard to unplug,” she said. Steinman said the job can feel overwhelming as well, even though she described being called to become a rabbi as a teenager. “When I tell people that I have one day off a week, they’re shocked,” she said. Rockford, who is preparing to become a rabbi in May, said she remained optimistic about the future, saying, “My hope for the rabbinate is that we continue to sort of ride this wave of diversifying the faces of people we look to as teachers, as rabbis and as spiritual leaders.”
The AP report said its religion coverage received support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. It said the AP is solely responsible for the content.