Barbara Ellison Rosenblit was born in Atlanta to a family deeply rooted in the South. With her parents’ encouragement, Barbara became the first person in her family to attend college when she left Atlanta to go to Brandeis University in 1966. There, she majored in English and American literature. In time, literary analysis skills became a window of entry into Biblical reading, analysis, and study. This was an early indication of Barbara’s lifelong interest in making interdisciplinary learning more complex by integrating mutually illuminating subjects, rather than simply grafting them awkwardly together. Eventually, the hallmark of Barbara’s work became this conscious joyful blurring of boundaries in both learning and teaching.

Barbara continued her education at Columbia University Teachers’ College, where she earned a Master of Arts in Language, Literature, Speech, and Theater in 1971. In 1975, after teaching high school English in New York and Berkeley, CA, Barbara joined Sherut L’am, a sort of “Israeli Peace Corps” for college graduates. She lived and worked as an English teacher in Yerucham, a development town. She left Yerucham after two years, armed with ever-useful Hebrew textual skills and with a new understanding of Jewish history.

Back in Atlanta, Barbara was recruited to work at the Epstein School, where she soon became the curriculum coordinator, and later the first middle school director, all while continuing to teach. Barbara’s projects always bore her signature integrated, interdisciplinary approach. One project, Na’aseh ve Nishma, successfully linked social action, Torah, and ethics study. She implemented portfolio-based Judaic graduation requirements and cross-faculty holiday curricula based on universal themes.

In 1994, Barbara enrolled as the first student in Emory’s fledgling Masters program in Jewish Studies. She became interested in exploring the oft-silenced voices of Biblical women. Her writing found an audience in journals such as CrossCurrents, Kerem, and Response.

When a new high school, an experiment in transdenominational Jewish learning, was starting up in Atlanta, Rabbi Simcha Pearl, its head, offered Barbara a free hand in designing courses. She accepted and began working at what is now the Weber School. An infusion of ideas came via an invitation from the Jewish Women’s Archive to serve as an educational consultant for them. She, in turn, incorporated their materials into a year-long senior elective course at the Weber School. Work with Sheila Miller, an integrative arts teacher, produced two public exhibits with the seniors: “A Place at the Table” and “No Idle Pursuits.”

Barbara continued to spread her intellectual wings, with teaching and mentoring always at the center. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Dante in Siena led to a senior elective on Dante at Weber that included contemporaneous Jewish topics. She and an NEH colleague from Marist, a nearby Catholic school, co-taught a joint Jewish-Catholic faculty seminar.

On all her journeys—intellectual, creative, or merely prosaic— Barbara’s source of love and inspiration has been her husband, Ishayahu, and their three children, Avi, Rachel, and Jonathan.