Having taught herself Hebrew at the age of twelve, Chava Weissler (1947-) earned her B.A. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University in 1967. Weissler worked as a secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. and then at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary while earning her M.S. in Library Service at Colombia University. After graduating in 1970, she began working at the Library of Congress where her work with books in various languages led her to study of Yiddish at the YIVO Institute in 1974.
Enjoying the academic atmosphere of YIVO, Weissler returned to school, earning her PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. Her dissertation (published in 1989) Making Judaism Meaningful: Ambivalence and Tradition in a Havurah Community, examined the worship services and social dynamics of a Jewish community influenced by the counter-cultural values of the 1960s and 1970s. After graduating, Weissler taught at Princeton for the next six years while researching Jewish women’s devotional literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard Divinity School. In 1988 she began teaching at Lehigh University as the Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Department of Religion Studies.
After finishing her book on devotional literature, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (published in 1998), Weissler began a new project examining the Jewish Renewal movement and its organization, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, collecting interviews, materials and publishing articles. At Lehigh, Weissler continued to teach courses based on her research until her retirement in 2015.
