Aryeh Cohen is Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature at American Jewish University. He has taught at Hebew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Brandeis University. Dr. Cohen is a board member of the Society for Textual Reasoning, the Progressive Jewish Alliance and is also a member of the advisory board of the Religious Perspectives on Work project of the Chicago based Interfaith Worker Justice.
Dr. Cohen is the author of Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot, and co-editor of Beginning/Again: Towards a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts. He is also a member of the Sh’ma advisory board, and an editor of the on-line journal Textual Reasoning. Cohen is a popular lecturer on Talmud, social justice, politics and on the contemporary Jewish scene. His writing on these topics and others has been published in Conservative Judasim, Sh'ma, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, The Association of Jewish Studies Review, Tikkun, The Reconstructionist, Kerem, The Jewish Spectator, The Jewish Journal and on-line at Jewschool.com and Jspot.org.
His varied experiences bring a unique perspective to some of the focal issues facing the contemporary American Jewish community. Cohen grew up in the Orthodox world, made aliyah at the age of 17 and served in the Army in the Hesder [joint yeshivah and army] program while at Yeshivat Har Etzion¬—one of the premier institutions of the Hesder movement. He lived in Israel for twelve years. During this time he completed his B.A. at the Hebrew University and worked with Gesher promoting dialogue between religious and secular high school students.
At the Hebrew University, he became interested in continental philosophy. This developed into an interest in the philosophy of language, which led to “post structuralist theory and deconstruction.” While at the Hebrew University, he became a fellow at the Hartman Institute of Advanced Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. The aim of the Institute was to put Talmud into philosophical conversation. Within the goal of pursuing the analysis of Rabbinic textuality in a more rigorous way, he pursued graduate studies at Brandeis University, working in Talmud, literary theory, and philosophy. While at Brandeis, Cohen was a member and teacher at Havurat Shalom, an egalitarian and consensus-based prayer and learning community in Boston.
In Dr. Cohen’s dissertation, he analyzed legal texts in the Talmud as literature, enabling him to ask questions about the way the Talmud dealt with women and Exile. This work led to his being hired, in 1995, as chair of the Jewish Studies department in the College of Arts and Sciences at American Jewish University and Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature in the college and at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, where he saw the position as a unique opportunity to pursue his research and at the same time teach Talmud to rabbinical students. The fact that he gets to teach this text in the original Hebrew and Aramaic—rather than in translation as he would have at another graduate school—makes it all the nicer. He believes that the challenge of teaching at a Seminary is to stay involved with the larger scholarly conversation beyond the walls of AJU—in journals, at conferences and through personal interaction with scholars at other institutions. As a professor of Talmud in the Conservative Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, Dr. Cohen has the responsibility and privilege of creating the curriculum for the Talmud program and was tasked with being the inaugural chair of the Rabbinics department. In this capacity he helped train the first class of Rabbinic students ordained west of the Mississippi. Since then the Ziegler School has ordained many classes of Rabbis.
Dr. Cohen is one of the founders of the Shtibl, a hassidic egalitarian minyan, which combines the passion of ecstatic prayer with commitments to egalitarianism and social justice. He is also the past president of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. As a board member of the PJA he helped found the Jewish Community Justice Project. This project—founded in partnership with Bet Tshuvah—trains mediators to help bring resolution to non-violent crimes by facilitating a conversation between victim and offender. JCJP has trained forty five mediators in a combination of technical mediation training and Jewish text study on issues of justice, compromise, tshuvah (repentance) and change. Dr. Cohen wrote and taught much of the text study curriculum. He is also a mediator with the program.
For three years, from 2003-2006 Dr. Cohen was a participant in a unique and groundbreaking project at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton University. The project called the Scriptural Reasoning Group brings together Christian, Moslem and Jewish Scholars to study their holy texts together and to learn from each other. Currently, Dr. Cohen is a member of an ongoing seminar of Moslem and Jewish scholars studying legal texts of the two traditions. The seminar is sponsored by the University of Toronto. He is also a member of the Scriptural Reasoning group at Cambridge University in England.
