Carole B. Balin

Carole Beth Balin (born 1964) is a Reform rabbi and professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Her research interests include Eastern European and American Jewish history, the history of Reform Judaism, and gender studies. She received laudatory reviews for her 2003 book To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, and has co-edited two other books. She is a co-curator of "Bat Mitzvah Comes of Age", a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of American Jewish History and the Moving Traditions Jewish non-profit.

Early life and education Carole Beth Balin grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, the daughter of Theodore G. Balin, a defense engineer, and Marcia Balin, a telemarketing sales trainer. She became bat mitzvah in 1977; her mother celebrated her own bat mitzvah in 1979.

She earned her bachelor's degree in history at Wellesley College in 1986. In 1989 she earned a master's degree in Hebrew letters at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, followed by rabbinic ordination in 1991 at the same institute. In 1994 she earned a Master of Philosophy degree at Columbia University, and in 1998 completed her PhD in history at Columbia. Her doctoral advisors were Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Michael Stanislawski.

Academic career Balin was a visiting instructor at the Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies in Moscow in 1995. She joined the faculty of her alma mater, the Hebrew Union College, in 1997 as assistant professor of Jewish history, advancing to associate professor in 2004 and full professor in 2006. She was also a faculty member of the Wexner Heritage Foundation from 1999 to 2003. The book explores in-depth the lives of five of these writers. She wrote the pieces "Betty Friedan’s 'Spiritual Daughters,' the ERA, and the CCAR" and "From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women's Rabbinic Network", which appear in the book The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, published in 2016. She also blogs for The Huffington Post.

In 2008 she was one of the interviewees on the PBS documentary The Jewish People: A Story of Survival.

Balin is the co-curator, with Josh Perelman and Lori Perlow, of the traveling exhibition "Bat Mitzvah Comes of Age", which opened in April 2012 at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. It has since visited eight other locales.

She is a member of the board of Moving Traditions. They have three children.