Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has been a leading voice for reproductive rights in the Jewish community in the US in recent years. As a scholar and organiser working with the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) she has been instrumental in the establishment of the Rabbis for Repro network and has used her public platform to inject a challenging faith-based alternative to the anti-abortion rhetoric and ideology of the American religious right. She has articulated the core tenets of Jewish teachings on abortion and social justice in mainstream media publications, contributing to a growing conversation about the diversity of religious opinion on abortion in the US, and highlighting the religious freedoms that are at stake when abortion access is restricted.

When we arranged to meet, the US reproductive rights movement was preparing itself for the Supreme Court to overturn the legal protections for abortion as an issue of privacy in line with the 14th amendment of the US Constitution's Bill of Rights, under the 1973 Roe v Wade case. Just four days prior to this interview the inevitable happened when the court released its judgment in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health (2022), overturning Roe and dismantling a constitutional protection that had persisted for almost 50 years.

In order to be as honest and reflexive as possible in the production of this chapter we decided not to divorce the conversation from this pivotal event, something that dedicated organisers like Rabbi Ruttenberg were feeling extremely distressed about. Instead, we framed the interview in its temporal context, using the significance of the Supreme Court's decision as a starting point for discussing the changing status of abortion rights in the US and the role played by faith leaders and communities that support abortion justice, both in the public square and in providing practical, local support.