Rivkah Tiktiner (d. 1605) is the first known female author of a Jewish printed book, a Yiddish-language work of ethics called Menekes Rivkah. She also wrote a liturgical poem, which saw several printings, for use on the festival of Simchat Torah, the joyous culmination of the fall festival season (occurring this year on Oct 10-11). Come, learn together about a way in which Jewish women in a traditional, pre-modern setting participated actively in creating public Jewish ritual.
Rachel L. Greenblatt is the Judaica Librarian at Brandeis University. She has served on the faculty at several universities, including Dartmouth, Harvard and Wesleyan, in addition to teaching Me’ah and Open Circles courses. She has extensive experience in remote class engagement in university and community settings. Rachel holds a Ph.D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and B.A. in History from Cornell. She has also studied biblical and rabbinic text at the Pardes Institute and at Matan – the Sadie Rennert Women’s Institute for Torah Study, both in Jerusalem.
Rachel’s scholarship focuses on the cultural and social history of Jews in central and eastern Europe. She is the author of To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague (Stanford University Press, 2014), which incorporates a wide variety of material and textual sources in reconstructing the ways in which Prague’s early modern Jews—women and men, young and old—told their own stories of their communal past and familial histories.