Rachel Havrelock
Assistant Professor

Rachel Havrelock is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation. She received a BA with honors in Hebrew and English Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and then co-authored a book, Women on the Biblical Road: Ruth, Naomi and the Female Journey (University Press of America, 1996), with her BA advisor, Dr. Mishael Caspi. Rachel began her graduate work at Tel Aviv and Bir Zeit Universities, continuing and completing it in the Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. She was a visiting assistant professor in the Religion Department at Swarthmore College before joining the UIC faculty in 2003.

Rachel is a contributor to The Torah: A Women's Commentary (Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2008) and the author of "The Two Maps of Israel's Land," Journal of Biblical Literature 126:4 (2007): 649-667; "My Home is Over Jordan: River as Border in Israeli and Palestinian National Mythology," National Identities 9:2 (2007): 105-126; and "The Myth of Birthing the Hero: Heroic Barrenness in the Hebrew Bible," Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008).

Rachel is completing River Jordan: The Mythic History of a Dividing Line, a manuscript that considers the Jordan River as a border in the Bible, in Rabbinic and Patristic exegesis and in Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms.

She has written and directed hip-hop plays, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah and Soundtrack City, that have toured extensively and run in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.


 My Home Is Over Jordan  (DOWNLOAD)
Havrelock, Rachel, (2007) My Home is Over Jordan: River as Border in Israeli
and Palestinian National Mythology', National Identities, 9:2, 105-126.
 Are There Witches in the Jewish Bible?  (DOWNLOAD)
"Are There Witches in the Bible?" Guilt and Pleasure Magazine,
Summer 2006, 144-147.
 The Journey Within  (DOWNLOAD)
Havrelock, Rachel. Parashat Vayetze. The Women's Torah Commentary (Tamara
Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea Weiss, Eds.) New York: Union of Reform Judaism
Press, 2007.
 The Two Maps of Israel's Land  (DOWNLOAD)