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Research Areas
Jewish Ritual and Liturgy; Feminist and Women’s Rituals; Ritual Theory; Christian Ritual and Liturgy
Education
Ph.D., Jewish Theological Seminary
M.S., Columbia University
B.A., Indiana University
Debra Reed Blank
Debra Reed Blank
Debra Reed Blank teaches and writes in the fields of Jewish liturgy, Rabbinics, and Ritual Theory. On the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York) since 1992, she was appointed the Rabbi Philip Alstat Assistant Professor of Liturgy in 1999, and remains there as a Visiting Scholar. She has also taught at the Academy for Jewish Religion (New York) and the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow).
In the fall of 2009, Blank was a Hadassah-Brandeis Scholar-in-Residence at the WSRC, where she began work on a book about the initiation rituals for infant girls that began appearing in the U.S. Jewish community in the early 1970s. Studying these as historical and social phenomena, she has discovered that Jewish-feminist innovative ritual belies feminist critique of anthropological study of ritual. The book’s underlying theoretical considerations will be whether self-consciously crafted women’s ritual differs from men’s ritual, and whether there are any implications for the general study of emergent ritual.
Previously, Blank’s research focused on the development of Jewish liturgy from the rabbinic through the medieval periods, as well as in the modern period. She has authored numerous articles and is a frequent lecturer in adult-education venues.
Current Projects
On leave for the 2011-2012 Academic Year.
Representative Publications
Blank, Debra. “Viewing the Rabbinic Institution of a Fixed Liturgy Through the Lens of Spirituality.” Conservative Judaism 61 (2008–2009):10-20.
Blank, Debra. “The French Practice of Repeating Sh’ma and Bar’khu for Latecomers to Synagogue.” In Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue, edited by Steven Fine and Ruth Langer, 73-94. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005.