Explore my Torah
I share my Torah widely via writing for mainstream and academic outlets — as well as podcasts and recorded classes!
“Can’t Stop Scrolling”
“Can’t Stop Scrolling,” hosted by Avidan Halivni and Rabbi Avigayil Halpern and sponsored by the Jewish Learning Collaborative is a podcast for Torah teachers, Torah learners, Torah lovers, and the Torah-curious. Each episode, Avidan and Rav Avigayil interview a millennial or Gen-Z Torah educator about their relationship to Torah, and learn a favorite text together.
I write regularly on Torah, queerness, and what’s going on in the Jewish community — and sometimes, in my life! Subscribing is the best way to keep up with me and my work.
Substack: Approaching
Selected publications
Floral Torah: Toward a Theory of Femme Torah - in Tekiyah Gedolah
“Femme Torah sparkles like a tiara plucked from a dress-up bin and tells a story like a set of scarlet-painted nails emphasizing the gesticulations of a speaker. Femme Torah is over the top, joyful, glorious, and playful. Femme Torah looks at what is necessary and says, no, this is not nearly enough. This approach to Torah and justice work says, maybe Torah is not needed for justice work — but that is the wrong question to be asking anyway. Torah is wanted, Torah is delighted, Torah is sustaining and energizing and opens our souls ever wider.”
Bounded Love: Hilchot Eruvin and Queer Theory in Conversation - in the Journal of Jewish Ethics
“Hilchot Eruvin offers us a realm of halakhah that is preoccupied with many of the same questions as queer theory: what is public and what is private? How do we distinguish between our own bodies and spaces and others’? Is the nature of our relationships with one another fixed, or does it shift? In focusing on the generative overlap between the concerns of Eruvin and those of queer theory, this paper works to both illuminate queer perspectives within the Rabbinic project and to challenge the assumption that halakhic texts are a body of work which fundamentally prop up heterosexuality. In offering queer readings of Hilchot Eruvin, I suggest that queerness can be found in halakhic structures and methods, and that engaging in questions of queerness within the Rabbinic and halakhic canons must move beyond texts which explicitly address sexuality.”
“What is feminist Torah and how do we do it?”— at Exploring Judaism
“This is what feminist Torah is all about – seeing Torah not as a set of resources but a relationship that we are engaged in deeply. The Torah pushes us and we grow; we push the Torah and the Torah grows. We must move away from commodification of the Torah and towards intimacy.”
Bad Feelings and the Future— inYa’aleh Zikhroneinu: Essays for the Yamim Noraim published by Halachic Left
“Turning toward unhappiness rather than away from unhappiness, per Ahmed, not only helps us realize that we share experiences with others, but this pushes us to work collectively to trouble the “happiness”of the mainstream (which is illusory at best and built on others’ suffering at worst).
Teshuva requires charata. Charata requires, simply put, feeling bad. Our work is to refuse to avoid our bad feelings.”
Parshat Vaera - at Jewish Currents
“The plagues, then, are the empire’s atrocities made visible; they are middah k’negged middah, a parallel that is also an exposure. In her book Doppelganger, which deals extensively with doublings and recapitulations, Naomi Klein writes: ‘We sense that . . . even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelganger, so can the earth—from habitable to uninhabitable.’ The plagues, for the Egyptians, are such a moment of collapse and reversal: Their world flips, and reveals its corresponding, constitutive horrors.”
I am a regular contributor to Jewish Currents’ Friday Parshah column — you can read more here.
Selected Recorded Classes
Can the Torah Love Us Back? Reparative Reading Strategies in Feminist Torah
So many of us have had experiences with Torah that are painful. We teach ourselves — and are taught in our learning spaces — to expect moments of alienation and even cruelty from the Torah we love so much. In this class, we use the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s frameworks of paranoid reading and reparative reading to look at halachic texts that restrict who is invited to practice embodied mitzvot.
This lecture was a part of Torah Studio's Elul 5784 Series: Our Torah, Ourselves.
My Rabbi Says It’s Okay!” Psak, Power, and Epistemic Justice
When a Jew asks a halachic authority for psak, they are offering that person an element of control over their decision-making. In this shiur, we examine where that power comes from, if it is possible to exercise it responsibly, and how the progressive observant Jewish community's relationship to halachic power mirrors — or doesn’t — other kinds of relationships to power.
Part of "Jewish Reckoning with Power: A Halachic Left Learning Series" Originally recorded on Sunday, March 15, 2026 at the Cambridge Community Center.