Contact the author at
author@rashisdaughters.com
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About the Author
Maggie Anton was born Margaret Antonofsky in Los Angeles,
California. Raised in a secular, socialist household, she reached adulthood
with little knowledge of her Jewish religion. All that changed when David
Parkhurst, who was to become her husband, entered her life, and they both
discovered Judaism as adults. That was the start of a lifetime of Jewish education,
synagogue involvement, and ritual observance. In 2006, Anton retired from
being a clinical chemist in Kaiser Permanente's Biochemical Genetics Laboratory
to become a fulltime writer.
In the early
1990's, Anton learned about a women's Talmud class taught by Rachel Adler,
now a professor at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. Nearly every Wednesday
for five years, she and about six other women met around Rachel's dining room
table to study Tractate Berachot. Now Anton continues her studies individually
with Rabbi Aaron Katz Ph.D., Professor of Rabbinics at the Academy of Jewish
Religion (CA branch).
In
1997, as her children Emily and Ari left the house and her mother was declining
with Alzheimer's Disease, Anton sought new interests. She became intrigued
with the idea that Rashi, one of the greatest Jewish scholars ever, had
no sons, only three daughters. Slowly but surely, she began to research the
family and the time in which they lived. Much was written about Rashi, but
almost nothing of the daughters, except their names and the names of their
husbands. Legend has it that Rashi's daughters were learned in a time when
women were traditionally forbidden to study the sacred texts. These forgotten
women seemed ripe for rediscovery, and the idea of a book about them was born.
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