Shari Joy Berman is a Special Associate Professor at the Hirosaki University Graduate School of Medicine in Northern Japan. She’s just begun her 11th year at the university, the past two at the Medical Department, exclusively. Shari has been teaching English, writing, editing, and translating from Japanese to English for over 40 years.
With a passion for writing, she was a part-time journalist for Japanese publications, a stringer for Aussie industry insider magazines, first video-tech and then fashion- and so much more!!!
A lay leader since January 2007, one responsibility of the newly elected president of Kona Beth Shalom congregation, these days she honors Shabbat in various ways in two US times zones and in her own in Japan. She led services between July and November 2020, including officiating two, heavily-masked, in person/Zoom b’nei mitzvah for the Tokyo-based Jewish Community of Japan (JCJ) when they were between rabbis. Working with doctors and medical students all week and navigating Shabbat services both on Saturday and Sunday because of their time difference, her joke used to be: “I play a doctor on TV during the week and a rabbi on TV on the weekends.
