Gestating Judaism by Cara Rock-Singer

Gestating Judaism by Cara Rock-Singer

An ethnography of how people use reproductive practices to transmit and reinvent American Judaism.

In Gestating Judaism, Cara Rock-Singer develops a new analytic technique called ethnodrashy (a combination of rabbinical midrash and sociological ethnography) to explore the centrality of reproductive bodies to the intellectual, political, and spiritual life of American Judaism. She considers how, in reproduction, religious practices like the mikveh combine with secular practices like fertility treatments in ways that challenge the popular idea that religion occupies a separate sphere of life from politics or science. In fact, Rock-Singer shows how Jewish feminists have leveraged the work of reproduction to intervene in important conversations about both politics and theology. Drawing together religious studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies, Gestating Judaism shows how Jewish tradition is transmitted and reinvented through the ongoing labor of reproduction.

Cara Rock-Singer is the Lama Shetzer Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also affiliated with the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program.