CHAVA WEISSLER
Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization, Department of Religion Studies, Maginnes Hall, 9 West Packer Avenue, Bethlehem, PA 18015
Phone 610-758-3372, Fax 610-758-3391, e-mail lew1@lehigh.edu

Chava Weissler is the Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University. Besides teaching at Lehigh, Professor Weissler also offers Jewish Studies courses at Lafayette College, DeSales University, and Moravian College as part of the Berman Center's consortial teaching program. She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Her areas of specialization include Jewish folklore, modern Judaism, Jewish tradition, Hasidic tales, Jewish mysticism, and women in Jewish history.

Professor Weissler is the author of Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Beacon, 1999), the first comprehensive study of women's devotions in Yiddish (tkhines), a nearly lost genre of Jewish literature. The book was awarded the 1999 Koret Foundation Book Award in the category of Jewish History and was praised at the ceremonies as a pioneering work that changed the ways in which scholars think about the role of women specifically, and the common folk in general, in the shaping of the religious life of Judaism. The volume was also a finalist for Gratz College's 2000 Tuttleman Foundation Book Award. Her research was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Annenberg Research Institute, Harvard Divinity School, and Lehigh University. Weissler serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Jewish History in New York and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Professor Weissler, who received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2003, presented the prestigious Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures at the University of Washington in May 2003. Weissler gave three talks on the theme "Jewish Spirituality in America: The Jewish Renewal Movement."3