Raysh Weiss

Raysh Weiss (born 1984) is the Rabbi of Beth El of Bucks County.[1][2] From 2016-2019, Weiss served as the spiritual leader of Shaar Shalom Synagogue in Halifax, Nova Scotia[3][4] as well as the Jewish chaplain at Dalhousie University and University of King's College.[5] Weiss is also the founder and director of YentaNet[6][7] and is a social activist[8]; a musician; and a published author on popular and academic subjects for such media as Tablet Magazine,[9][10] JewSchool, Zeramim: An Online Journal of Applied Jewish Studies,[11] and My Jewish Learning.[12][13] Weiss is an alumna of both the Bronfman Fellowship (2001)[14] and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship program (class 25).[15] She has served on the national boards of both T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Havurah Committee.[16]

In 2012, Weiss, who wrote her doctoral dissertation about Yiddish musical cinema of the early 20th century,[17] 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.[18]

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.[19]

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![20] for whom she produced the album Party Like it's 1899 (2004), hosted and produced Continental Drift[21], 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.[22]

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),[23], 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.[24] During her time in Nova Scotia, Weiss was one of only two women serving as full-time senior rabbis of Conservative synagogues in Canada[25] and was a regular contributor to the "Rabbi to Rabbi" column in The Canadian Jewish News.[26][27][28] In 2015, Weiss was named by The Forward as one of the paper's "36 Under 36."[29]

Weiss is a descendant of Rabbi David Altschuler, the 17th-18th Century author of the Biblical commentaries, the Metzudat David and the Metzudat Tzion.[30][31]