Raysh Weiss

Raysh Weiss (born 1984) is a Co-Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Natick, MA.[1] Previously, Weiss served as Senior Rabbi of Beth El of Bucks County in Yardley, PA[2][3] and as the spiritual leader of Shaar Shalom Synagogue in Halifax, Nova Scotia,[4][5] as well as the Jewish chaplain at Dalhousie University and University of King's College.[6] Weiss is also the founder and director of YentaNet[7][8] and is a social activist;[9] a musician; and a published author on popular and academic subjects for such media as Tablet Magazine,[10][11] JewSchool, Zeramim: An Online Journal of Applied Jewish Studies,[12] and My Jewish Learning.[13][14] Weiss is an alumna of both the Bronfman Fellowship (2001)[15] and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship program (class 25).[16] She has served on the national boards of both T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Havurah Committee.[17]

In 2012, Weiss, who wrote her doctoral dissertation about Yiddish musical cinema of the early 20th century,[18] earned her PhD in comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, where she had previously earned her MA with a minor concentration in Music Studies. During her years in Minnesota, Weiss founded and helped lead an independent Jewish community, the Uptown Havurah.[19]

A Fulbright ethnomusicology research fellow in Berlin (2006–2007), Weiss has presented at multiple conferences and written on the origins of klezmer music and its shifting cultural reception; some of Weiss' studies on this theme can be found in her chapter "Klezmer in the New Germany: History, Identity, and Memory" in Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational.[20]

A visual artist and musician, Weiss, as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University (where she majored in Comparative Literary Studies, philosophy, and Radio/Television/Film) founded and led Northwestern's klezmer band WildKatz![21] for whom she produced the album Party Like it's 1899 (2004), hosted and produced Continental Drift,[22] the daily world music show on WNUR 89.3 fm (2005–2006), served as an award-winning political cartoonist for The Daily Northwestern, and she has written on the history and cultural narratives of the illuminated haggadah.[23]

A filmmaker (director, actor and writer), Weiss directed the award-winning live-action film The King's Daughter and, while a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary (from which she was ordained in 2016),[24] Weiss co-wrote and acted in a satirical video "If Men Rabbis Were Spoken To The Way Women Rabbis Are Spoken To," which, in The Jewish Week, opened up a conversation about gender equity in the rabbinate.[25] During her time in Nova Scotia, Weiss was one of only two women serving as full-time senior rabbis of Conservative synagogues in Canada[26] and was a regular contributor to the "Rabbi to Rabbi" column in The Canadian Jewish News.[27][28][29] In 2015, Weiss was named by The Forward as one of the paper's "36 Under 36."[30]

Weiss is a descendant of Rabbi David Altschuler, the 17th–18th century author of the biblical commentaries, the Metzudat David and the Metzudat Tzion.[31]