Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lectures
An Evening with the Rock-Singers

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Time: 7:00pm

Location: Kelley Presentation Room

 

Title: Reproducing Judaism: How Jewish Tradition is Remade through the Everyday Lives of
          American Jews

While Judaism is often thought about as a religion that happens in and through synagogues, ancient texts, and rabbis, this talk will explore American Judaism as a living, growing tradition that is maintained through bodies. “Reproducing Judaism” will show how American Jews of different ages, sexual identities, and levels of observance participate in the creative, reproductive labor of nurturing religious tradition.

 

Dr. 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.

 

She is the author of Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2026). This book examines how Jewish women utilize gendered bodily technologies to challenge normative structures within American and Israeli religious life. Dr. Rock-Singer is currently working on her second book project, Inherited Futures: The American Jewish Life of Genetics and Epigenetics, which incorporates her undergraduate research on genetics and epigenetics into her research on contemporary Judaism. Specifically, Inherited Futures investigates how modern science and technology have created novel forms of Jewish religion: new kinship practices that aimed to eliminate Tay Sachs, ritual communities that lend spiritual support to BRCA carriers, and popular media that has inculcated belief in epigenetic inheritance of Holocaust trauma. This book will shed new light on the role of biological science in imagining Jewish collective identity in 20th-century America.
 

Supported by Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Foundation