Scholar of Talmud & Rabbinic Literature · Lecturer in Jewish Studies at Vassar College
Dr. Ágnes (Ági) Vető teaches at Vassar College, where her courses span rabbinics, the Hebrew Bible, the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the Land and State of Israel — including the halakhot of war and peace, women’s rights, and the tensions between synagogue and state. She coordinates the Hebrew Language program at every level, from beginning Modern Hebrew through Talmudic Aramaic, and co-directs Vassar’s Jewish Studies Travel Seminar.
Her scholarly work reads the Talmud for the halakhic resources that might yet free agunot — chained women — from legal impasse, and, in an earlier register, for the rabbinic constructions of gender that shape the predicament. Ordained by Yeshivat Maharat in 2020, she is the first Hungarian-born Orthodox woman rabbi.
Silent Revolutions: Halakhic Shifts and the Empowerment of Jewish Women — a history of modest halakhic reforms and an argument, inspired in part by Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, that small, often unintentional legal adjustments have been and can again be engines of women’s agency. The project’s constructive half asks what halakhic mechanisms — the heter iska as paradigm — might be marshalled for contemporary reforms on the status of women within marriage.
“Reactivating Mi’un to Free Agunot Within the Framework of Halakhah” — a close reading of a tannaitic ritual that allowed wives to retroactively annul their marriages, and an argument for its contemporary halakhic reactivation.
Her growing work addresses the halakhot of war and peace, the ethics of the modern sovereign Jewish state, and the live tensions between synagogue and state in Israeli law — taught, too, in her Vassar classrooms.
