Rachel Barenblat
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Rachel Barenblat is an American poet, blogger, and rabbinic student.
Born in San Antonio, Texas in 1975 to Marvin and Liana Barenblat, Rachel moved to New England in 1992 to attend Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She holds a BA in religion and an Masters of Fine Arts in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Barenblat co-founded Inkberry, a literary arts non-profit organization, with Sandy Ryan and Emily Banner. From 1999-2002 she was a contributing editor at Pif Magazine and since 2006 she has been a contributing editor at Zeek magazine, a Jewish journal of thought and culture.
Barenblat is author of three poetry chapbooks: the skies here (Pecan Grove Press, 1995), What Stays (Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series, 2002) and chaplainbook (Laupe House Press, an imprint of Phoenicia Publishing, 2006.)
Since 2005 Barenblat has been a student in the ALEPH rabbinic program. Her blog, Velveteen Rabbi, was named one of the top 25 blogs in Time.com's First Annual Blog Index in spring of 2008. She has guest-blogged at Jewess, Kesher Talk, Sojourner, and the Best American Poetry Blog, and she spent a year writing weekly Torah commentaries for Radical Torah.
With Thurman Hart, Barenblat co-founded the first Progressive Faith Blog Con, a gathering for bloggers of progressive faith which took place in Montclair, New Jersey in 2006.
Her Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach, a free and open-source haggadah which combines traditional texts with poetry and creative interpretations, is used worldwide. As of 2008, the most recent edition is version 6.0 and can be downloaded here.
Barenblat lives in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, with her husband Ethan Zuckerman.
External references
"When Can I Run and Play With the Real Rabbis?"
FP Interviews Rachel Barenblat
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