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Gestating Judaism
The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion
Cara Rock-Singer
University of Chicago Press, 2026

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.

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front cover of Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
Edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the life sciences and made profound claims about human origins and the human condition, topics often viewed as the prerogative of religion. As a result, evolution has provoked a wide variety of religious responses, ranging from angry rejection to enthusiastic acceptance. While Christian responses to evolution have been studied extensively, little scholarly attention has been paid to Jewish reactions. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the first extended meditation on the Jewish engagement with this crucial and controversial theory.

The contributors to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism—from several academic disciplines and two branches of the rabbinate—present case studies showing how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts. Furthermore, they examine how evolutionary theory has been deployed when characterizing Jews as a race, both by Zionists and by anti-Semites. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism addresses historical and contemporary, as well as progressive and Orthodox, responses to evolution in America, Europe, and Israel, ultimately extending the history of Darwinism into new religious domains.

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