Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Prior to joining the team at Hartman, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.
Deborah is the author of Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud (Oxford University Press, 2026), which explores how the Talmud develops the idea of acting lifnim mi-shurat ha-din (lit., “within the line of the law”) and its implications for how we think about decision-making, Jewish law, and ethics.
