PHOTO: Alicia Jo Rabins performs with the Camas High School Choir at their "I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs" concert Thursday, Apr. 11, 2024 at Revolution Hall in Portland. (Jason Quigley)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
Alicia Jo Rabins has been busy. 
She’s recently released a live album of her collaboration with Camas High School, which was performed Portland in April of 2024 and in New York last May. She’s also just received a Covenant Foundation grant for her ongoing web series exploring the stories of biblical women – subject matter which is also at the root of her musical collaboration with the CHS Choir. She’s releasing a children’s book this fall and a memoir next fall. If that wasn’t enough , she’s studying toward Rabbinic ordination. 
“Girls In Trouble TV,” Rabins’ web series, is an offshoot of her long-running Girls In Trouble musical project and educational curriculum – the development of which was supported by a previous grant from the Covenant Foundation. The foundation, based in New York, works to support Jewish education, with particular interest in the intersection of arts and education – a natural fit for Rabins. While the original Girls In Trouble program is in-depth and immersive, Rabins had a different goal for this permutation of the project. 
“I wanted to do kind of the opposite, which is to take my teaching about biblical women and my art about biblical women and turn it into something that’s super accessible,” she said. “Anyone can just press play and get like the information delivered in a way that makes sense and it’s entertaining.”
Thus, she reunited with the team that she worked with to create “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.” The model is something akin to a culinary or travel show, with Rabins serving as something of a tour guide to the heroines of Jewish tradition. 
“They’re so good at taking information that could be dry or hard to convey, and they have somebody who’s really passionate about it at the center who turns it into an adventure,” Rabins said of the culinary show format, mentioning chefs Anthony Bourdain and Samin Nosrat as inspirations. “I also go out in the world with my team, and we interview different artists, teachers, activists, rabbis who are doing really interesting work in the Jewish world, to kind of shine a light on what they’re doing and get their perspective on the characters so that it’s not just my voice.”
The first episode of the series, centering on Vashti, is available now on YouTube. A second episode on Esther is expected before Purim this year. Thanks to the support of the Covenant Foundation, the series will encompass seven episodes in total.
Her new album, “I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs,” released in December of 2024, is a recording of her concert with the Camas High School Choir at Revolution Hall in Portland in April of that year – a performance which was repeated at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage in May. The Camas choir, under the direction of Ethan Chessin, commissions work from a Portland composer every other year whose work is not primarily in choral music. Chessin, who was nominated for a Grammy Award for music education for the collaboration, is a Portlander and, like Rabins, the parent of a student at Havurah Shalom’s Hebrew school program. 
“This was his 13th year teaching at Camas,” Rabins said of Chessin, “so he decided, for his bar mitzvah year, to focus on Jewish culture.”
“Collaboration” is a key and apt description of the work – the Camas High Choir are an accomplished outfit, and Rabins said that she and the 135 students learned a lot from each other. The performance also incorporated a string trio, a three-piece rock band and an animated visual element – along with spoken passages where choir members read their classmates’ anonymous reflections to the material they were signing about. 
“I gave them prompts about some of those stories and asked them to anonymously contribute responses to how they connected to the stories and sort of little tidbits about their own inner lives and then edited them into a little spoken section,” Rabins said. “We had these beautiful moments where we got a glimpse  into the students’ inner lives, which is very key to what I am interested in doing. It’s like, ‘where do our personal questions and struggles and feelings and needs at the moment intersect with these ancient stories?’”
A live video of Rabins’ performance with the Camas High Choir is available on YouTube, along with an exclusive mini-documentary about the project, and the album is available on major streaming services or through Bandcamp.
Rabins tells a less ancient story in “Hallelujah: The Story of Leonard Cohen,” to be published by Behrman House later this year. It will be her fourth published book after two collections of poetry and a volume of personal essays on the intersections of early parenthood and Jewish spirituality. As opposed to her pitching the idea for the book, Rabins was recruited by Behrman House to pen a children’s book on the legendary singer and songwriter. 
“At first, I was like, ‘I don’t know how to write a kids’ book,” Rabins said. Her publisher responded, she recalled, “Well, you write poetry. It’s really similar.”
Rabins’ memoir, set to be published in 2026, centers on her spiritual journey. 
“It’s about growing up in a non-observant Jewish family in an area with very few Jewish people and having very little awareness of my culture heritage,” she said, “and then just feeling very much called to learn about my heritage, learn the text and the rituals and the traditions. I never wanted to leave the world I grew up in; I just felt I was missing a certain kind of grounding and finding my own authentic practice. Part of that was also becoming a teacher and finding my way of stepping into the chain of teaching and transmitting the texts and traditions to my students.”
For someone who has been used to writing in songs and poems, longform non-fiction was a whole new world of creating. 
“It was like learning another language,” she said. You have to think about plot, even if it’s nonfiction. You have to think about keeping it interesting, you have to think about suspense, and you have to be able to remember, 50 pages later, what you said 50 pages ago.”
Amidst it all, Rabins remains a student. She is studying independently for rabbinic ordination with a trio of rabbis she has known throughout her creative career, building on subject matter covered in the two years she spent studying full-time in a Jerusalem yeshiva and while earning her master’s degree in Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies from The Jewish Theological Seminary – plus her 20 years’ experience teaching. It’s a process she expects to complete in 2026.
Rabins found herself motivated to pursue ordination following multiple instances where, in her role leading services for her independent study b’nai mitzvah students, she would be mistakenly addressed as “rabbi.”
“It got to a point where I was like ‘I actually am doing the work of rabbi and I should just earn that title in whatever way works,’” she said. “That almost more out of respect for [Rabbis] and their path.”