Rachel Slutsky is an advanced doctoral candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She holds an Isadore Twersky Fellowship at Harvard, and she will be the 2022 Monsignor Oesterreicher Professor of Jewish Studies and Jewish-Christian Relations at Seton Hall University. Rachel’s work explores the ways in which ancient and modern discourses employ Jewish law to cultivate communal self-understanding in juxtaposition to other Jews and the non-Jewish world more broadly.
Rachel has taught and spoken throughout North America and internationally, most recently at the University of Hong Kong. She is a faculty member for Ma’ayan, an institute for Jewish adult education in Boston, MA, and a former adjunct faculty member at Lesley University. Rachel has held numerous fellowships, including a Summer Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center, a FLAS Fellowship in Yiddish at the University of Chicago, a Pedagogy Fellowship from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and numerous Center for Jewish Studies Fellowships from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Harvard, Rachel received her MA in Biblical Studies from the University of Chicago and her BA with honors in Jewish Studies and English literature from Stern College, Yeshiva University. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband, Jacob.