MEET HUC-J IR’S STUDENTS
2009
ISSUE 72 | 43
Although she knew she wanted to at-
tend rabbinical school after graduating from
college, she sought to first “experience being
a Jewish adult living my Judaism in the real
world, without the safety net of my family.”
This led her to Washington, D.C., where she
was selected to be an Eisendrath Legislative
Assistant for the Religious Action Center of
Reform Judaism (RAC). Next, she accepted
a legislative position with Americans United
for Separation of Church and State. In this
capacity, she spent seven years fighting for
religious liberty and protecting the religious
diversity of this nation.
“
While I loved my work in Washington,
D.C. and strongly believe it is imperative to
lobby for a just government, I knew that po-
litical activism was only a part of my
Judaism,” she recalls. On Capitol Hill I was
working on policies that affected real peo-
ple’s lives, but I was removed from those
actual people. By becoming a rabbi, I can be
a true agent for change by building and im-
proving my community.”
Whether as a Wexner Fellow, which en-
ables her to build community across
denominational lines, or as the co-coordina-
tor of the
Pesach
Project in the renascent
Jewish communities of Russia, Ukraine, and
Belarus (see page 32) during her Year-In-
Israel, she says, “I am learning how to lead
my future congregation through both edu-
cation and action. Inspired by my dad’s
example and teaching, I have found my own
path to this career. I look forward to leading
others toward a rich and full Jewish life.”
Joseph Skloot
’
s journey to the rab-
binate was inspired by his grandfather, Rabbi
Samuel Volkman, a 13
th
-
generation Jewish
spiritual leader who was ordained at HUC
in Cincinnati in 1934. Skloot says his grand-
father “wasn’t a rabbi, he was
the
rabbi. But,
more than that, he represented a notion of
scholarship, which was immensely important
to me. He was simply the smartest person
that I knew, and his bookshelves were three
volumes deep. And that was what it meant
to be a rabbi: To be learned – and to be
deeply engaged in community life.”
A fifth-year rabbinical student and
Tisch Fellow (see page 16) at HUC-JIR/NY,
Skloot is passionate about combining his
rabbinate with an academic career. He is a
Modern European Cultural and Intellectual
History graduate of Princeton, where he was
a leader of the Princeton Center for Jewish
Life, his thesis was a biography of Joseph
Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire,
and a critical analysis of the
Hertz Pentateuch
.
“
I went through his archive at the University
of Southampton in England and spent a year
reading everything that Hertz wrote. Hertz’s
commentary, which is read by Orthodox,
Conservative, and Reform Jews, was the
book that united American Jewry and Eng-
lish-speaking world Jewry.”
For Skloot, Hertz represented “the strug-
gle of many intellectuals of his historical
period who were searching for the balance be-
tween being both a Jew and a citizen of the
modern world.” He seeks to continue to
study that struggle in his graduate work,
which will explore “the formative texts of rab-
binic Judaism and how those texts have some
claim on our lives today.” This Fall he will si-
multaneously fulfill his last year of rabbinical
education and begin his studies toward a doc-
torate in Early Modern and Modern Jewish
History at Columbia University, under the
guidance of Dr. Elisheva Carlebach.
He credits HUC-JIR for imbuing intel-
lectual study with heart. “HUC-JIR has been
about heart and heritage, about nurturing
my spirituality, love of prayer and Jewish
music, and interest in counseling and engag-
ing with people.” As he follows in the
footsteps of his grandfather, and of his men-
tor Rabbi David Ellenson, who studied
religion at the doctoral level at Columbia
while completing his rabbinical studies at
HUC-JIR, Skloot says “I know that my rab-
binate will be enriched by my scholarship,
and my scholarship will be enriched by my
rabbinate.”
He points to the intellectual curiosity of
his eleventh- and twelfth-grade students at
Congregation Kol Ami in White Plains, NY,
and their highly educated, professional par-
ents, and concludes: “Jews are really smart
people. They don’t want to be talked down
to. As a rabbi and keeper of the tradition, I
hope to give them a Judaism that is intellec-
tually demanding.”
T H E FA M I LY L E G A C Y
Aaron Miller, C ’11
Joseph Skloot, N ’10
Jean Bloch Rosensaft
Elizabeth McNamara Mueller
