Danya Ruttenberg

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is the author of Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting (Flatiron Books), which was a finalist for the 2016 National Jewisih Book Award. She is also author of Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press), nominated for the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature and a 2009 Hadassah Book Club selection. She is editor of The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU Press) and Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press).

She has been named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of ten “rabbis to watch,” one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis, and as one of the “36 Under 36″ (36 most influential leaders under age 36). She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, and has also appeared in the Best Jewish Writing series, the new edition of Encyclopedia Judaica, and Bitch magazine’s Bitchfest, as well as many other publications. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and has been featured on Upworthy.

Rabbi Ruttenberg is also co-editor, with Rabbi Elliot Dorff, of three books for the Jewish Publication Society’s Jewish Choices/Jewish Voices series: Sex and Intimacy, War and National Security, and Social Justice. She’s also a contributing editor to Lilith and the academic journals The Journal of Jewish Ethics and Women and Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, as well as serving on the editorial board of Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.

Before receiving her rabbinic ordination from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, she received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and worked in San Francisco as a freelance writer. Rabbi Ruttenberg has served as Senior Jewish Educator at Tufts Hillel, Campus Rabbi at Northwestern Hillel, Director of Education for Ask Big Questions and currently serves as Rabbi-in-Residence at Avodah, an organization dedicated to creating leaders for economic justice.