Rebecca Alpert
Professor of religion
Rabbi Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert (born April 12, 1950) is Professor of Religion Emerita at Temple University, and was one of the first women rabbis. Her chief academic interests are religions and sports and sexuality in Judaism.
Early life and education
Rebecca Alpert was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Sylvia and Irving Trachtenberg. She attended Erasmus Hall High School and Barnard College before getting her Ph.D. in religion at Temple University and her rabbinical training at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her specialization is in American and especially Jewish American religious history, and she focuses on issues related to gender, sexuality and race. Her thinking about many of these issues was shaped by her teachers, who included Elaine Pagels and Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.
Career
Alpert was ordained in 1976 making her one of the first 6 women ordained rabbis. After completing her Ph.D. in 1978, Alpert worked on a contractual basis with a number of synagogues in the U.S. and Canada. During this time she also taught courses in Holocaust Studies at Rutgers University, and she was the dean of students at the RRC until 1987. Thereafter she served in several capacities at Temple University: as Director of Adult Programs, Director of the Program in Women's Studies, a faculty member in the departments of religion and women's studies, Senior Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts, and in June 2022 Professor Emerita.
“Rebecca Alpert” enters the record as professor of religion. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rebecca, Alpert and Professor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7301653. VIAF identifies the subject as 69103000. The Library of Congress control number is n86862909. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1976, 1978 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rebecca Alpert” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.