Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg currently resides on Dakota land, also home to the Anishinaabe, known as South Minneapolis. She was raised on Lenape land, in the Philadelphia suburbs, by Ken z”l and Shelley, accidental organizers who taught her that Jewish communities should be life-giving and values-aligned, and that it is up to us to build them. She became a rabbi in order to learn our people’s diverse and nuanced histories, and create spaces, ritual, and organizing that helps transform our relationships to past, present and future.
Ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 2018, Jessica is a founding collective member of the Radical Jewish Calendar project. She organizes with Matir Asurim: Jewish Care Network for Incarcerated People and on the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council. She worked as a national organizer at Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, and has served and learned from the visionary young people at Keshet’s LGBTQIA Teen Shabbatonim and the Jewish Congregation at SCI-Phoenix Prison. She authored an Introduction to Trauma, Healing and Resilience for Rabbis, Jewish Educators and Organizers, published by Reconstructing Judaism, and co-authored, with Rabbi Ariana Katz, For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year, forthcoming in 2024 by Wayne State University Press.
Influences & Background
I pursued rabbinical school in 2012, in large part fueled by a concern for the ways in which centuries of traumatic experiences and systemic oppression had been internalized in Jewish life and was shapes Jewish self-perception, culture and politics. I’ve been studying trauma in earnest since 2015. While a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, I began reading, studying and writing about trauma; exploring the different lenses through which people understand trauma and healing; and trying to understand the intersections of individual and collective trauma, and formulate what a trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive rabbinate means and looks like in practice.
Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity by Aurora Levins Morales has shaped my rabbinate. In “Historian as Curandera,” she writes:
“The role of a socially committed historian is to use history, not so much to document the past as to restore to the dehistoricized a sense of identity and possibility. Such ‘medicinal’ histories seek to re-establish the connections between peoples and their histories, to reveal the mechanisms of power, the steps by which their current condition of oppression was achieved through a series of decisions made by real people to dispossess them; but also to reveal the multiplicity, creativity and persistence of resistance among the oppressed...History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains the present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs.”
In this lineage, I seek to teach medicinal Jewish histories: uncovering untold stories that we need to understand our time.
In the lineage of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan and Reconstructionist Judaism, I work to uncover the ways that Jewishness has changed over time, developed in context of the world around it, and has always included multiple streams.
I’m inspired and influenced by generations of queer and trans and women Jewish organizers feminists liturgists ritualists writers and rabble rousers, and by movements for liberation rooted in collective care and the just distribution of land and resources
