Gestating Judaism
The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion
Gestating Judaism
The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion
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.
288 pages | 10 halftones | 6 x 9
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 many labor of reproduction.
Class 200: New Studies in Religion
Religion: American Religions, Judaism
Women's Studies:
Table of Contents
Note on Translations and Hebrew Texts
Before the Beginning: The Miscarrying God
Introduction
Part I: Technologies of American Jewish Religion
1. Infertile Matriarchs: Staying with the Loss
2. The Mikveh’s Body Multiple
3. Delivering Tradition: The Oral Torah of Moshe Rabbeinu and Ina May Imeinu
The Gap: Exodus, Birth, and the Letdown of Liberation
Part II: Amniotic Politics: Bodily Practices for Divergent Futures
4. Birthing a Body Politic: From Reptilian Sovereignty to Amphibious Ecologies
5. Water Gatherings: Iyyun, Recognition, and the New Media of the Jewish Body Politic
6. Life in Suspension: Salt Wombs and the Politics of Hospitality
Endings: Leviathan and the Breast Pump
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index