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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.

2026 Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology

La Santa Muerte becomes a lens for understanding how Oaxacans relate to saints, loved ones, and other “special dead.”

In Oaxaca, images of saints and loved ones, as well as of victims of political or criminal violence, are seemingly everywhere. While Oaxacans relate to all sorts of “special dead,” they are particularly devoted to La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), a female reaper-like figure whose popularity has risen in tandem with violence throughout Mexico.

The Intimacy of Images recontextualizes Oaxacans’ relationships with their “special dead” through the lens of La Santa Muerte, examining how devotees closely interact with what Lamrani terms “intimate images”: not only devotional effigies but also photographs, films, tattoos, and murals, and even dreams and visions. Though Mexicans have a well-known cultural familiarity with death, Lamrani argues that devotion to La Santa Muerte builds upon this intimacy even as it also participates in the production of terror and reflects political and criminal violence. Ultimately, Lamrani finds that these human-image interactions represent more than Catholic devotion; they reveal the secrets of Oaxacan political, religious, and social life, embody changing relationships to mortality and violence, and even offer insight into the practice of anthropology itself.

Writing on Water grasps the phenomenon of sound in prayer, that is, a meaning in sounds and soundscapes, and a musical essence in the act of praying.

The impetus for the book arose from the author’s fieldwork among traditional Jews during the era of communism in Budapest and Prague. In that period the Jewish religion and Jewishness in general were supressed and rituals became semi-secret and turned inward. The book is a witness to these communities and their rituals, but it goes beyond documentation. The uniqueness of the sounds of the rituals compelled the author to try to comprehend how melodies and soundscapes became the sustaining/protective environment, as well as the vehicle, for the expression of a world-orientation—in a situation where open discourse was inconceivable.

The book is based on extensive interviews, musical recordings, photographs and scholarly analyses. It is unique in its choice of communities, its wealth of original documents, and its novel interpretation of sound.

Writing on Water is creative non-fiction. The presentation is evocative and poetic, but at the same time it transmits knowledge. The book can aid research and serve in courses in philosophy, religion, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, aesthetics, Jewish studies, folklore, oral history, and performance studies. It is also a work of art and literature.