Towards Female Inclusion in Our Teaching
By Andrea Hoffman, Lauren Cohen Fisher, Rabbi Ben Berger, Leah Kahn, Danielle Kranjec, and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz
The Kranjec Test posits that a source-sheet with more than two sources must include at least one non-male-identified voice.
What would it look like if we challenged ourselves to build source sheets that include at least one woman’s voice? Source sheets are part of the DNA of Jewish learning, and yet too few of them draw from the teaching of Jewish women. When we curate all-male source sheets, we send the message that men have a monopoly on Jewish wisdom. We know that this is not the case. The Kranjec Test is an invitation to reimagine whose wisdom we teach.
Specifically, it invites us to draw from more women and relegate male-only source sheets to the dustbin of history.
The Kranjec Test takes its name from a combination of the Bechdel Test and Danielle Kranjec, Senior Jewish Educator for the Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, who set a challenge for herself to learn and teach more women’s voices.
For the last several months, our team at Hillel U’s Center for Jewish and Israel Education challenged ourselves to meet the Kranjec Test’s standard, working toward the authentic inclusion of non-male voices, including transwomen and gender queer people, in our teaching and curricula.
Success in the Kranjec Test has been difficult for our team to achieve, and we have often failed. We have a natural bias towards our training, which was curated and largely male-dominated. We also tend towards pre-modern Jewish sources, most of which were composed by men. But putting together source sheets should not be a perusal of our existing rolodex; it should be an opportunity to expand our knowledge bases and libraries. This has motivated us to become students again in a way that requires time, energy, and humility.
The Kranjec Test is about more than inclusive source sheets; it is about expanding our learning, emboldening our teaching, and reimagining what we think of as “core Jewish wisdom.” In order to more regularly pass the Kranjec Test, we must:
Learn women’s Torah. We cannot teach what we haven’t learned, and so we have an obligation to actively seek out women’s Torah. If you’re not sure where to start, this list includes resources that we have found powerful and inspiring.
Elevate women’s voices. We must give platforms to women who have been otherwise relegated to the sidelines. Not only does this include (re)discovering female memoirs from generations past, but also celebrating and centering the Torah of contemporary female scholars, rabbis, and educators.
Teach women’s wisdom. We all have materials we like and return to frequently. But if those sessions do not include women’s voices, we must be ready to revise them so that they more accurately reflect the collective teachings of our people and traditions.
As we continue the work of bringing forward the voices of those unseen and unheard in our communities, we must remember that gender is only one axis for inclusion. Our hope is that The Kranjec Test will be a step in thinking and acting critically about the texts we study, the voices we cite, and the ways we teach.
We are committed to a 5781 in which our teaching more regularly passes the Kranjec Test. We invite you to join us.
Andrea Hoffman is Director of Conferences and Immersives at the Center for Jewish and Israel Education at HIllel International, where Lauren Cohen Fisher is the Associate Director of Israel Education, Rabbi Charlie Schwartz. is the Director of Jewish Content, and Leah Kahn is the Director of Educational Development. Danielle Kranjec is Senior Jewish Educator at Hillel Jewish University Center (Hillel JUC) of Pittsburgh and Rabbi Ben Berger is Vice President for Jewish Education at Hillel International.
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This is a wonderful and helpful framework. Thank you for articulating this challenge so clearly. The Jewish Women’s Archive is a rich resource of women’s voices and texts, and we share your goal of creating a more inclusive and expansive approach to Jewish wisdom.
Kol HaKavod for challenging us all to examine our cultural bias and orientation to how we teach sources! I look forward to bringing this to pedagogic conversations with educators in our community to push us forward. Y”K to Hillel for raising the bar!
I’ve found artwork and poetry (in addition to books and essays) to be excellent places to bring in the Torah of women and folks who aren’t just men to my source sheets! And when you need trans/nonbinary voices for your source sheets, remember you can reach out to (and compensate) the trans Jews in your community~
Danielle Kranjec is an an incredible and supportive educator ~ I am the scholar I am now because she cared about my queer voice at a time when I was being silenced. BIG HEARTS on this article!!
What important and necessary work!
I find myself loving this idea and also struggling with it, by which I really mean making excuses for myself for not having always done this. Do we fulfill this if we use ourselves as one of the source texts (not as the creator, but as quoting ourselves)? For source sheets that share different pieces of Talmud (or other rabbinic text), is that one source or multiple sources? I also wonder, if we are just presenting rabbinic text on the source sheet, so as not to bias the reading of the text by students, how does that fit into this paradigm? In all, I’m wondering how to best accomplish this…and challenging myself as to what that means.
Yes! Kol hakavod, the time is now. At Moving Traditions, in bringing Jewish text study to teens I have enjoyed and found powerful the challenge of creating pairings and connections between rabbinic and medieval and modern Jewish texts mostly by men and often from “a male perspective“ and what I would call feminist and queer wisdom and the wisdom of women and people of color. This speaks to students today who grapple with how to make meaning of ancient texts. It keeps things relevant and alive and it acknowledges the expansiveness of wisdom and values that emerge from living in two (at least two) civilizations. It is a way into Torah in its more limited definition and it’s broader definition. Also, at times we need to still make space and name the grief that is the heart of why it’s hard to find texts by Jewish women. We need to make these source sheets and we need to name how so much Torah and Jewish wisdom was never written down or valued and then play our part in “recreating holy time” in the words of poet Merle Feld in her classic poem “We all Stood Together.”
Thanks. I have been following this rule for several decades in any sermon/dvar torah I have given or service I have led.. It has pushed me to explore and seek out writing by women — midrash, Torah commentaries,poetry. Of course this is only a step toward true tikkun.
I have a concrete suggestion and point to push on: Sefaria.
This is a wonderful resource, and many of us use it often as a compilation of traditional Jewish texts from many time periods. However, my perusal is that except for some materials by Nechama Leibowitz z”l there are no materials by women.
This may be tied to Sefaria’s lack of non-Orthodox commentaries and sources as well — but there are many Orthodox women writing and teaching today as well. Sources that are too expensive for the average reader to purchase such as the ongoing Feminist Talmud Commentary series are ripe for sharing (after working out copyright issues) on Sefaria.
I urge us to work with/ influence the leadership of Sefaria to make sources by women more widely available. How can we move this forward?
Thank you so much for raising this issue. We completely agree that the Sefaria library needs a wider variety of sources — including women’s voices. This is a strategic priority for us and something we are actively working on.
Because Sefaria is an open-access database, we can only include public domain texts or those released with an open license — such as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC. Since women publishing Torah scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon, there is virtually nothing already in the public domain. When it comes to content produced in the last century, we generally need to negotiate and advocate for open access — oftentimes with publishers that have financial interests.
If you are aware of Torah by women available with an open license, are willing to release your own work(s) into the commons, or would like to offer philanthropic support to this effort please be in touch with us at [email protected].
Chava Tzemach
Communications & Marketing Manager, Sefaria
A wonderful idea (and about time!) and one I will really try to utilize, even as a lay person, when I prepare D’var Torah or other teachings. I want to share a story to show how important this is to our future leaders. My (now 23 year old) daughter was in her 3rd grade Judaica class at day school, and after listening to all the bible stories of our forefathers, she raised her hand and asked her teacher, “What about the women?” Her teacher responded by changing her curriculum and to this day credits Abby for this revelation. Let’s hope there is a day when future children don’t have to ask that question.
Fantastic frame. Thank you for it’s careful and thoughtful articulation!