For the past three years, Rabbi Laura Lieber has come home to Fayetteville at least once each month, serving as the rabbi of the Jewish community of Northwest Arkansas, then rushing back to her work at the University of Chicago where she is a doctoral candidate. This fall, instead of heading towards O'Hare Airport, she made a short journey from her family's home to St. Paul's Church where she delivered a presentation in the McMichael Lecture Series.

Rabbi Laura Lieber was born in Fayetteville, where she attended the public schools and then the University of Arkansas, where she was a Sturgis Fellow majoring in English Literature. Upon her graduation in 1994, Summa Cum Laude, she left for her first year of Rabbinical School at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. In 1995, she returned to the States to complete her Rabbinical education at the Cincinnati campus of her seminary. Since receiving her Rabbinic ordination in 1999, she has continued her studies at the University of Chicago, where she is currently working on her dissertation.