Pamela Barmash

Considered among the leading voices in Jewish ethics and spirituality, Rabbi Pamela Barmash integrates deep knowledge of the textual sources of Jewish wisdom with profound sensitivity to the joys and travails of the human condition. She is the Chair of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative/Masorti Movement and Professor of Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew at Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as director of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies there. Before that, she was the rabbi at Temple Shaare Tefilah, Norwood, Massachusetts.

She is also a dayyan (a religious court judge) on the (International) Joint Beit Din of the Conservative/Masorti Movement and was the 17th woman ordained as a Conservative rabbi. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. 
She has published six books and over fifty articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly journals, encyclopedias, and popular media and more than twenty official responsa and letters of guidance for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. She is currently working on two books, one on Jerusalem in the religious imagination of the Bible and a commentary on the book of Exodus.

Her latest book, Modern Responsa: An Anthology of Jewish Ethical and Ritual Decisions, presents contemporary responsa (Jewish ethical and
ritual decision-making) by rabbinic authorities, men and women, across movements (Conservative, Orthodox, Reform), geographic locales, and ethnicities (Ashkenazic, Sefardic, Mizraḥi), to show how rabbis expert in Jewish law apply principles, precedents, and rules from
Judaism’s legal tradition to real-life issues. She illuminates the dynamic nature of Jewish law, the
creativity of Jewish legal writings, and the multidimensionality of the Jewish experience in
modernity.