Assistant Professor of Bible

Elsie Stern, Ph.D., is a biblical scholar whose teaching often focuses on social justice issues. She has been an assistant professor in the Department of Theology at Fordham University, where she taught Bible and Jewish studies, and served as the assistant director for public programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. In addition to her academic teaching and research, she has taught widely in both formal and informal educational settings in the United States and abroad. She has taught in the Me’ah adult education program in Philadelphia and New Jersey and has served as a scholar in residence at congregations around the country. She spent a year as an educator at the liberal synagogue in Geneva, Switzerland, and served as a staff member at a summer camp in Belarus.

She has written curricula on a wide range of topics, including Jewish literature and artistic representations of biblical subjects. Her current research focuses on the transmission and reception of biblical texts in early Jewish settings. She is particularly interested in the ways in which the Torah that is transmitted by rabbis and teachers, and received by Jewish audiences, is, and always has been, far more expansive and variegated than the written texts themselves.

Stern received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Master of Arts and doctorate from the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Rebuke to Consolation: Bible, Exegesis and Ritual in the Literature of the Tisha b’Av Season (Brown Judaic Series, 2004) and is a contributor to the Jewish Study Bible and the Women’s Torah Commentary (Women of Reform Judaism, 2008).