MEET

Michaela Brown

Michaela Brown is thrilled to be starting her third (of five!) year at Hebrew College Rabbinical School (located outside of Boston, MA) in Fall 2021. She has also spent summers in the batei midrash of Hadar (Summer '19) and Pardes (Summer '18), where she fell in love with talmud torah. Most recently, Michaela was a 2020 T'ruah Rabbinical Student Summer Fellow and she was also the 2019-2020 Twersky Education Fellow at the Jewish Women's Archive. Michaela is a proud alumna of BBYO, having served on its international teen board for two years, and now works as a Jewish education consultant for them. She got her BA in Jewish Studies with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia, where her capstone project was creating a Jewish text-based sex education curriculum for adolescents. Michaela has also taught Jewish sex content for OneTable, Feminism All Night Beit Midrash, The Riverway Project of Temple Israel, and the New Synagogue Project.


I'm deeply inspired by the philosophy of SVARA, the traditionally radical and queer yeshiva, that accessing Jewish texts as someone traditionally marginalized (for me: being queer, a woman, from a secular/interfaith family background) is a pathway towards a more vibrant and liberatory Judaism for all. Likes: Talmud, Kabbalah, Shabbat, queer theory, anti-capitalism, sex, halakha (Jewish law) as a non-traditional Jew, ritual, Song of Songs, and feminist midrash. Dislikes: the patriarchy, denominational Judaism, and injustice.