Authors

Maggie Anton

Maggie Anton is an award-winning author of historical fiction, as well as a Talmud scholar with expertise in Jewish women’s history. She was born Margaret Antonofsky in Los Angeles, California, where she still resides. In 1992 she joined a women’s Talmud class taught by Rachel Adler. There, to her surprise, she fell in love with Talmud, a passion that has continued unabated for over thirty years. Intrigued that the great Jewish scholar Rashi had no sons, only daughters, she started researching the family and their community.

Thus the award-winning trilogy Rashi’s Daughters was born in 2004, to be followed by National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Apprentice and its sequel, Enchantress. Then she switched to nonfiction in 2016, winning the Gold Ben Franklin Award in the religion category for Fifty Shades of Talmud: What the First Rabbis Had to Say about You-Know What, a lighthearted in-depth tour of sexuality within the Talmud. In 2022, she returned to fiction with the Independent Publishers’ Silver Award-winning The Choice: A Novel of Love, Faith, and the Talmud, a wholly transformative novel that takes characters inspired by Chaim Potok and ages them into young adults in 1950s Brooklyn. Her latest historical novel is The Midwives’ Escape: from Egypt to Jericho, which describes the Exodus from the point of view of an Egyptian mother and daughter who join the Hebrews to follow Moses to the Promised Land.

Since 2005, Anton has lectured about the research behind her books at hundreds of venues throughout North America, Europe, and Israel. She still studies women and Talmud, albeit mostly online at https://www.conservativeyeshiva.org/learn/. You can follow her blog and contact her at her website, maggieanton.com. You can also find her on Facebook and Goodreads. And if you liked this book, please give it a nice review at all the usual websites. Maggie has been married to David Parkhurst, her books’ illustrator, since 1970. They have two children, six grandchildren, and one cat.

Rachel Adler

Rachel Adler is the David Ellenson Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles Campus. She pioneered in integrating feminist perspectives into interpreting Jewish texts and law. Her book Engendering Judaism (1998) is the first by a female theologian to win a National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought. Rabbi Adler has a PhD in Religion and Social Ethics from University of Southern California, rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College in 2012, an M.A. in English Literature from Northwestern University, and an MSW from University of Minnesota.

She has published over 55 articles, many of them reprinted in collections. Recent articles include “The Torah, Our Chavruta,” in These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness edited by Joshua Garroway and Wendy Zierler (CCAR Press, 2020), “Social and Political Rights Irrespective of Sex” in Deepening the Dialogue: Jewish-Americans and Israelis Envisioning the Jewish Democratic State edited by Rabbis Stanley M. Davids and John L. Rosove (CCAR Press,2019), “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” (CCAR Journal 2014) and “Guardianship of Women in Jewish and Islamic Legal Texts” with Ayesha Chaudhry in Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning: Encountering our Legal Other edited by Anver Emon (OneWorld Press 2017). Books in progress include Pour Out Your Heart Like Water: Jewish Perspectives on Suffering (Oxford) and Gender and Jewish Thought: Theology and Ethics, with Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi.