Roberta Kalechofsky is an American writer, feminist and animal rights activist, focusing on the issue of animal rights within Judaism and the promotion of vegetarianism within the Jewish community. She is the founder of Jews for Animal Rights and runs Micah Publications or Micah Books, which specializes in the publication of animal-rights, Jewish vegetarian, and Holocaust literature. She is married to Robert Kalechofsky, a retired mathematics professor from Salem State University. They appear together representing Micah Books at a publisher, writer, vegetarian, and animal rights events around North America, including the Boston Vegetarian Society's annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. Their two sons each have earned doctorates.
Education and teaching
Kalechofsky was born in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, receiving her B.A. in 1952, followed by an M.A. in English literature from New York University in 1956, and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1970, also in English literature. She has taught at the University of Connecticut and Brooklyn College.
Career
Kalechofsky is the author of Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons, as well as seven works of fiction, poetry, two collections of essays, and a monograph on George Orwell. Micah, which Kalechofsky founded in 1975, has published two haggadot for a vegetarian seder, one of which, Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, has been exhibited at Harvard University in an exhibit on food and politics, and at the Jewish Museum in New York. Philosopher Tom Regan has said of Kalechofsky, "f all the historians of ideas with whom I am familiar, if I had a choice between listening to just one of them, I would not hesitate to choose Roberta. She is that good, that worth spending time with."
Jews for Animal Rights (JAR)
Kalechofsky founded Jews for Animal Rights in 1985 with the aim of upholding and spread the Talmudic prohibition against causing suffering to living creatures, known as tza'ar ba'alei hayyim. The group promotes the ideas of Rabbi Abraham Kook on vegetarianism, and campaigns to find alternatives to animal testing.
1980: Grant from National Endowment for the Arts in small Press Publishing; finalist in Massachusetts Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.
1977: Finalist in Massachusetts Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction; cited for Distinctive Writing in Best American Short Stories of 1977; grant from National Endowment for the Arts in Small Press Publishing.
