Thinking With, About, and Against “Jewish Reproduction”

Over the past four decades legal scholars, ethicists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and demographers have laid bare the centrality of reproduction to social life, power, and politics. At this convening, we will think together about how Jewish reproduction shapes kinship structures, ritual life, imaginations of Jewish pasts and futures, concepts of personhood, and communal boundaries.

Schedule:

Wednesday, May 7

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM - Session 1: Bodies of Knowledge
Chair: Rafe Neis (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Laura Yares (Michigan State University), Reproduction as a Preoccupation in Jewish Engagement Education: Domesticity, Continuity, and Instagram

Ben Kasstan-Dabush (University of Edinburgh and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), “Vaccines, Jewish reproduction and (un)certain bodies of knowledge”

Respondent: Cara Rock-Singer (University of Michigan)


2:30 - 4:00 PM - Session 2: Futurity
Chair: Lauren Gwin (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Mara Benjamin (Mount Holyoke College), Resurrection/compost

Tiarra Maznick (Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU)), “Nana Didn’t Survive the Camps for Nothing”: The Holocaust and Jewish Reproductive Futurities

Respondent: Lea Taragin-Zeller (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)


4:30 - 6:00 PM - Session 3: Repro Images and Imaginaries
Chair: Deborah Dash Moore (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Sari Fein (Smith College), “‘If Only with a Womb for Bearing I Was Create’: The Image of Sarah’s Womb in Late Antique Jewish Literature”

Gabriel Chazan (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Between Shteynberg and Steinberg: Leo Steinberg's Translations

Respondent: Deborah Forger (University of Michigan)



Thursday, May 8

9:00 - 10:30 AM - Session 4: Bio-Theologies of Reproduction
Chair: Seda Saluk (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Sara Ronis (St. Mary’s University), Pregnant with Possibilities

Cara Rock-Singer (University of Michigan), Birthing a Body Politic: From Reptilian Sovereignty to Amphibious Ecologies

Respondent: Elliot Ginsburg (University of Michigan)


11:00 AM - 12:30 PM - Session 5: Making Jewish Families
Chair: Iris Rachamamov (Tel Aviv University/University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman (Bar Ilan University), “Single Motherhood in Mandatory Palestine: Challenging the Normative Family Model”

Cassandra Euphrat Weston (University of Michigan), Jewish Socialist Women Parenting Without Marriage: Matilda Robbins, Pauline Newman, and Radical Comradeship in the First Red Scare

Jordan Katz (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Beyond Bloodlines: Adoptive Reproduction and the Forging of Alternative Jewish Families in Early Modern Europe

Respondent: Anna Bonnell Freidin (University of Michigan)


2:00- 3:30 PM - Session 6: Rituals, Rites, and Rights
Chair: Karla Goldman (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (Virtual, Cambridge University), Women and Astronomical Cycles of Sound: Singing for Fertility in Northern Morocco

Rachel Kranson (University of Pittsburgh), Spiritual Resistance: Making Abortion Sacred Through Communal Jewish Ritual

Respondent: William Calvo-Quirós (University of Michigan)


4:00- 5:30 PM - Session 7: (Re)producing Judaism through Activism
Moderator: Melynda Price (University of Michigan)

Presenters:
Lisa Fishbayne-Joffe (Brandeis University), Antisemitism in the Struggle for Abortion Rights in Canada

Alice Mishkin (University of Michigan), We Will Be the Generation:' Jewish Continuity and Palestine

Respondent: Michal Raucher (Rutgers University)