Join Literary Modiin for an April author event, featuring: - Rachel Neve-Midbar, author of Salaam of Birds: Poems - Edna Shemesh, author of Amstel - Haviva Ner-David, author of Hope Valley.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds has won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and will be published by Tebot Bach Press. She is also the author (under the name Heimowitz) of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach Press, 2014.). Rachel’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, as well as other publications and anthologies. She was recently a finalist for the COR Richard Peterson Prize, winner of the Passenger Poetry Prize and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel completed her MFA at Pacific University in 2015 and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Edna Shemesh is an Israeli author, translator, and book reviewer, invited lecturer at Harvard University and SIS University in Shanghai, twice winner of the ‘Am Hassefer’ Translation Prize of the Israel Ministry of Culture, winner of the international Women of the Mediterranean Short Story Competition sponsored by UNESCO, short listed for the Sapir Prize for Israeli fiction. She translated into Hebrew books such as Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama and Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier. At MacDowell, she worked on her fifth novel, Nude. Her previous books, Amstel, The Sand Dunes of Paris, and Hotel Malta have been published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, and translated into English. Her fourth novel, Go, Pave the Sea will be published in 2018. Go, Pave the Sea is her most political novel, dealing with the terrible price paid by all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, via the story of three protagonists, one Israeli and two Palestinians. Currently she teaches creative writing at the Rehovot branch of the Hebrew University.

Haviva Ner-David’s 2006 ordination made her one of the first Orthodox women to claim the title of “Rabbi,” part of her lifelong work to enable Jewish women—and Jews in general—to reexamine and reengage with the tradition. Born Haviva Krasner-Davidson, Ner-David was raised Orthodox, but the lower expectations for girls’ participation caused her to check out of synagogue life. As she became more involved in Jewish study as an adult, she applied to Yeshiva University’s rabbinical program in 1993 but never received a response from the university. She went on to document her struggles to become an Orthodox woman rabbi in Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2000. In 2006 she earned a PhD in Talmud from Bar Ilan University and was granted private ordination by Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky, finally achieving her dream of becoming a rabbi. She then became director of Mikveh Shmaya, the Masorti mikveh at the Hannaton Educational Center in the Galilee, where she incorporated feminist innovations and reinterpretations of the role of the ritual bath in Jewish life. In 2014 she published Chana’s Voice: A Rabbi Struggles with Gender, Commitment, and the Women’s Rituals of Baking, Bathing, and Brightening.