Life on the Fringes:
A Feminist Journey Towards Traditional Rabbinic Ordination
By Haviva Ner-David

Life on the Fringes is both memoir and scholarly treatise.
A Feminist Journey Towards Traditional Rabbinic Ordination
By Haviva Ner-David
Life on the Fringes is both memoir and scholarly treatise.
Life on the Fringes is both memoir and scholarly treatise. It is the story of a young girl coming into her own in the Orthodox Jewish world in which she grew up. Haviva Ner-David, who was the first woman to be publicly ordained by an Orthodox rabbi, was studying for her ordination when she wrote this book. She weaves, in a skillful and heartfelt way, personal stories and scenes from her life with Jewish legal texts relating to women and Judaism — thus posing the personal struggle against the classic rabbinic discussion, creating a dialogue between the two.
Haviva Ner-David is a writer and rabbi. In 2006 she became the first woman to publicly receive Orthodox rabbinic ordination, only to leave Orthodoxy and call herself a post-denominational rabbi. Ten years later, she received interfaith ordination from the One Spirit Interfaith-Interspiritual Seminary and now goes by post-denominational inter-spiritual rabbi.
She writes both fiction and non-fiction and is the author of three spiritual journey memoirs, a novel, short stories, essays, a blog on Times of Israel, scholarly articles and a guidebook for engaged couples. Her short story, “Blame,” won the 2016 Lilith Magazine short fiction contest.
Link to short story.
Photo credit: Carmel Avivi
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