Delphine Horvilleur
Quick Facts
Biography
Delphine Horvilleur (born 1974) is France's third female rabbi, and (as of 2012) editor-in-Chief of the quarterly Jewish magazine Revue de pensée(s) juive(s) Tenou'a. She leads a congregation in Paris, and is currently co-leading the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, a Jewish liberal cultural and religious association affiliated to the World Union for Progressive Judaism, which she joined in 2008. In 2013 her book "En tenue d’Eve. Féminin, Pudeur et Judaïsme" ("In a Birthday Suit: Feminism, Modesty and Judaism"), which discusses the representation of nudity and modesty in the Bible, was published.
She was born and raised in Nancy, but moved to Jerusalem at the age of 17 and studied life sciences at the Hebrew University. Five years later, she came back to Paris and worked as a journalist. She studied with well-known Jewish scholars, such as French philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin and ex-Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, and eventually moved to New York and studied at Drisha Yeshiva. She was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 2008, and later returned to France. In 2016, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem awarded her a special commendation.
In 2009, she became editor-in-chief of Tenou'a a quarterly journalpublished by the Tenou'a association from the Liberal Jewish Movement of France. It makes it a reference magazine of liberal Jewish thought in France, where various religious sensibilities are found around societal issues (feminism, environment, sexuality, migration policy, etc.).
Publications
- (en) Notarikon: The Rabbinic Art of Word-breaking, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Brookdale Center, 2008.
- (en) Lifting the Curtain - The theatrical Kol Nidre [archive], article of Delphine Horvilleur in the collective work All these Vows [archive] published byrabbin Lawrence A. Hoffman (en), 2011, Jewish Lights Publishing.
- (fr) En tenue d’Ève : féminin, pudeur et judaïsme, Grasset, 2013
- (fr) Comment les rabbins font les enfants, Grasset, 2015
- (fr) with Rachid Benzine, Des mille et une façons d’être juif ou musulman, Seuil, 2017
- (fr)Réflexions sur la question antisémite, Grasset, 2019
- (fr)Comprendre le monde, Bayard Culture, 2020