Talia Kaplan serves as the Rabbinic Fellow at Park Slope Jewish Center and Program Coordinator of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue. She has been fortunate to teach and learn in communities up and down the East Coast, in the Midwest, and in Israel. An empathetic pastoral presence, Talia has also provided care as a chaplain at New York Presbyterian Hospital and as a mikveh guide with ImmerseNYC. 

 

A resident of Washington Heights, Talia came to New York from D.C., where she advocated for immigration justice with colleagues of diverse faiths and facilitated experiential education programming for the Religious Action Center. She is a trained community organizer through JOIN for Justice. Talia has also done policy research on the harms of mass incarceration and human trafficking for T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and Juvenile Law Center. She is currently collaborating with NCJW as they build out a Jewish communal strategy advancing reproductive justice. 

 

Talia graduated Phi Beta Kappa with high honors from Wesleyan University, where she studied government, Jewish studies, and Middle Eastern studies. As part of her education, Talia spent a summer in the Beit Midrash at Pardes and a semester at the University of Haifa, during which she interned with the pluralistic Leo Baeck Education Center. She has spoken to international audiences and published on a number of topics, including gender in Jewish ritual, adolescent Jewish education and collective memory, and the intersection of Jewish law and interpersonal relationships. 

 

Talia is pursuing rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she is also a candidate for a MA in Jewish Gender and Women's Studies and a Certificate in Pastoral Care and Counseling.