Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann came to Stanford University in 1996. She is the first University Chaplain from a tradition other than Christianity in Stanford’s history. In 2001, she was appointed Senior Associate Dean for Religious Life. She teaches and lectures widely on Jewish feminism, rabbinical ethics, the relationship between religion and education, and social justice. Rabbi Karlin-Neumann was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1982. She has been a Hillel Director and Jewish Chaplain at UCLA and at the Claremont Colleges, a congregational rabbi in Alameda, California and a Regional Director for the Union for Reform Judaism, the congregational arm of the Reform Movement. At Stanford, she teaches courses including “Spirituality and Nonviolent Social Transformation” and “Rereading Judaism in Light of Feminism“. She is married to biologist George Karlin-Neumann and is the mother of two children.
“I was profoundly changed by my own undergraduate experience as a first generation college student. I work on campus as a way to continue to offer the blessings lavished upon me by those who helped me imagine vistas beyond what I had previously known. I try to engage religious questions in down to earth ways, using the tools and language of my tradition to help make a path to create a better world. The joy of this work is meeting and becoming close to students, faculty, staff and alumni ,who are grappling with big questions–career, ethics, relationships, what one individual can do to change the world, how to balance love, fun and life, what is education for, what it means to create community. I get to observe and help Stanford become a place of invisible lines of connection, whether through programs, conversations over coffee, ritual moments of hellos and good byes, or learning in the classroom and beyond.”