About

Andrea Dara Cooper is an Associate Professor and Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Scholar in Modern Jewish Thought and Culture at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research intersects Jewish thought, cultural theory, and continental philosophy, emphasizing connections between religious studies and critical theory. She has authored the book Gendering Modern Jewish Thought, which explores how kinship functions as an organizing metaphor for ethical and communal relationships in twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, analyzing familial tropes in the works of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Her scholarly interests include modern Jewish thought, gender studies, post-Shoah ethics, animality, and cultural and literary theories. Cooper's upcoming research project examines post-Shoah ethics and animality. She teaches courses such as Introduction to Jewish Studies, Modern Jewish Thought, Post-Holocaust Ethics and Theology, and Women, Gender, and Judaism, with a focus on how gender questions relate to subjectivity, agency, and hermeneutics. She is actively involved in professional organizations, serving as co-chair of the Study of Judaism Unit of the American Academy of Religion, on the steering committee for the Animals and Religion Unit, and as a board member of the Association for Jewish Studies Women’s Caucus.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Theology
• Linguistics
• Archaeology
• Philosophy
• Anthropology
• History
• Literature

Selected publications

• Reading Adorno with Feminist and Queer Theory

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-09-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter considers the relevance and resonance of Adorno’s thought for discussions within feminist and queer theory. Adorno can contribute to these conversations, and feminist and queer thought can inform contemporary scholarship on Adorno. Using critical gender analysis, the chapter argues that we should read Adorno critically, precisely because this is in the spirit with which he read and wrote himself. His insistence on particularity can only be generative once we grapple with his contradictions; Adorno tends to homogenize women/the feminine while insisting that human experience is not homogenous. Adorno’s work anticipates contemporary discussions, particularly as issues related to gender and sexual difference are highlighted in late capitalist cultural frameworks. But a non-apologetic reading of Adorno must also dwell in his difficulties, attentive to the limits of these connections. If we engage with his thought in this way, we can come away with a productive analysis that is open to feminist and/or queer critique.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cat Mitzvah

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art

  This chapter explores questions of Jewish identity and religious subjectivity by using Joann Sfar’s graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat as a point of focus. It considers the relationship between Judaism, animals, and literature and challenges the link between spoken language and religion. Fictional narratives allow us to imagine a world in which animals, both human and nonhuman, can claim religious personhood. Animal representations in literature, far from being isolated from the concerns of real-life animals, can offer alternatives for multispecies engagement. Through this literary case study, we can examine how human and other than human animal identities have been historically constructed alongside one another, particularly in colonial contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Gendering Modern Jewish Thought

  2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Archaeology

  For Cooper, a more responsible and ethical reading of Jewish philosophy comes forward when it is opened to the voices of mothers, sisters, and daughters

  PublisherDOI

• Gender and Modern Jewish Thought

  2021-02-23

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Modern Jewish thought has been largely a masculine discursive space in both its historical construction and its focus, which is reflected in the makeup of its accepted canon. Certain figures are generally included in edited collections and syllabi of modern Jewish thought and philosophy. The field’s medieval and early modern antecedents include 12th-century scholar Moses Maimonides and 17th-century thinker Baruch Spinoza. The 18th-century German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn is generally viewed as the “father” of the field. Beginning with the 19th- and 20th-century German philosopher Hermann Cohen, prominent 20th-century figures include the following: German philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber; French-Lithuanian thinker Emmanuel Levinas; American thinkers Mordecai Kaplan, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel; and post-Holocaust philosophers and theologians Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, and Eliezer Berkovits. Other notable figures include founding Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger, Orthodox rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Abraham Isaac Kook, political philosopher Leo Strauss, Israeli Orthodox thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and American rabbi and philosopher Eugene Borowitz. Sometimes the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and feminist theologians such as Judith Plaskow are included, but the entirety of the canon is often male-dominated. Form tends to mirror content in the formation and maintenance of such canons. In these cases, male-dominated discourse, drawn from a network of male thinkers who operate in relation to one another, favors approaches that foreground and privilege the masculine. While this textual corpus has remained largely immune to critiques informed by gender and feminist analysis, important and groundbreaking contributions to the fields of gender and Jewish philosophy have been made. It is not simply a matter of adding women-identified and nonbinary voices to the canon (although any heterogeneity is preferable to none), but of attending to critiques informed by gender and feminist analysis in order to uncover viewpoints and frameworks that have been overlooked. This article includes sources that attend to this aim in a variety of ways and with differing methodologies: texts by women-identified writers and texts about women and gender (in many cases overlapping), texts that critically analyze the construction and preservation of sex and gender hierarchies, texts that uncover philosophical omissions by male-identified thinkers, and texts that philosophically reflect upon experiences and lived realities that have been largely neglected, including embodiment, emotion, affect, vulnerability, maternity, and a feminist ethics of care, among others. These interventions consider, among other foundational questions: Who is included or excluded from the canonical framework? What can contemporary theories of gender teach us about the use of gendered terms in Judaism? In what ways can feminist criticism identify the masculinist assumptions of texts and the hierarchical construction of masculinity and femininity? How does the historical construction of the field reflect exclusive social and political norms? These questions and demands can extend to the ways that we canonically (re)construct the field of modern Jewish thought. This article addresses developments and interventions in critical gender analysis in relation to modern Jewish thought, tracking these contributions in secondary literature to increase their visibility, with an eye to expanding the scope and inclusiveness of the canon in the future.

  PublisherDOI

• From Sister-Wife to Brother-Neighbor: Rosenzweig Reads the Song of Songs

  Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  Abstract This paper investigates a sibling metaphor central to Rosenzweig’s reading of the Song of Songs in The Star of Redemption , in which the lovers yearn to be united in societal fraternity. His interpretation is marked by fraternal tropes and the subsequent effacement of gender. Rosenzweig transposes the erotic energy in the Song from a celebration of difference to a longing for sameness, a move that has exegetical, philosophical, and theological implications. Ultimately, the erotic sphere of revelation is surpassed by neighborly “brotherliness” in communal redemption.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing humanimals: Critical animal studies and Jewish studies

  Religion Compass · 2019-11-20 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Recently, there has been a proliferation of scholarship intersecting the fields of critical animal studies and Jewish studies. These publications span many time periods and areas of study, including the Hebrew Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, and modernist literature, and all demonstrate the significance of literary analysis to studying animals and religion. Scholars have persuasively argued that the study of animals in literature should include reflection on real animal others. Research on animals and animality in Jewish studies takes this concern as a point of focus, using literary approaches to show how human and non‐human animals are co‐implicated in systems of ethical and political exclusion. The works I discuss illustrate how encounters with actual animals can animate concerns with figural animalities, and vice versa. Following Donna Haraway, I argue that such literary approaches can point to new and urgent methods of multispecies engagement, allowing us to imagine ourselves out of damaging anthropocentric narratives.

  PublisherDOI

• The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications

  Anthrozoös · 2017-04-03 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications." Anthrozoös, 30(2), pp. 350–351

  PublisherDOI

• Maintaining Oppositions in Musar

  Journal of Jewish Ethics · 2016-12-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar, Geoffrey Claussen presents Simḥah Zissel as frequently caught between seemingly opposing modes that he aimed to reconcile. Simḥah Zissel succeeded in setting up an isolated learning community for his students while exposing them to general Haskalah studies. He insisted upon loving others, while highlighting the withdrawal from worldly pleasures as a virtue. He was a committed educator who valued private study and meditation, a solitude seeker who nonetheless valued politics and the active marketplace, aspiring to reach a large audience and yet cultivating his ideas of fellowship behind the walls of an insular academy. Claussen's book provides us with an essential background to both contemporary Jewish thought and the growing field of Jewish studies today. Simḥah Zissel allows us to see how Jewish learning expanded, balancing oppositions, and embracing contradictions.

  PublisherDOI

• Redesigning design education: the next Bauhaus?

  Northumbria Research Link (Northumbria University) · 2001-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  This chapter, following an invitation to deliver a keynote address at the inaugural ICSID Educational Seminar 2001 Seongnam, Korea, examines the theme of emerging service design thinking for education. This was also the subject of Young’s collaborative student learning project; ‘Review of a Design Practice Learning Project to Pilot Heightened Social Responsibility and Engagement,’ (with Hilton K). This was presented at EAD, Barcelona in 2003, and further developed in keynote addresses by Young at International Service Design Northumbria conference (ISDn1) at the Sage, Gateshead, March 2006 and ISDn2 at the Centre for Life, Newcastle, November 2006. The subject of new design paradigms and emerging methods is now a co-sponsored PhD between the Design Council and Northumbria’s CfDR (Young & Siodmok supervisors – research funding £32k to support the studentship). This includes a review of the Dott 07 public commission projects. Young’s service design research led to a commission with the ONE NorthEast; Design Innovation Education Centre project in 2003, to develop service design expertise and resources within NE England. Also, to join the AHRC/EPSRC Designing for the 21st Century project; Service Design for Science and Technology SMEs, 2006, based in SAID Business School, Oxford University. Practice-based research using service design methods were deployed to improve the experience of patients of the NHS; this led to Dott 07 sponsoring the Design and Sexual Health project developed by Young with Gateshead PCT and the Strategic Health Authority. Related Northumbria-funded PhD student Lauren Tan working on the future development of design thinking in area of service design and linking to Dott07.

  OA PDF

• Patentability of Genetically Engineered Microorganisms

  JAMA · 1983-03-25 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  BEFORE the development of genetic engineering technologies, it was questionable whether microorganisms that theoretically could be produced by application of such techniques would legally qualify for patent protection. Section 101 of the Patent Act, 35 USC §101 (1976), authorizes the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks to issue a patent to one who "invents or discovers any new and useful process... manufacture, or composition of matter." In<i>Funk Brothers Seed Co v Kalo Inoculent Co</i>, 333 US 127 (1948), the US Supreme Court had held that nonengineered microorganisms were "products of nature," and not subject to patent claims of one who "discovers" them as naturally occurring. Patents had been issued for the application of microorganisms to produce chemicals such as antibiotics and agents to remove environmental pollutants—uses patentable as "processes" within the terms of the Patent Act—but the US Patent and Trademark Office had rejected patent claims to the microorganisms themselves.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• R. Michael Young

  University of Utah

  1 shared

• Sean Blair

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Course Development Grant…
• Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Course Development/Enhanc…
• Fellow, “Post-War Memory, Holocaust Memorialization, and the…
• Association for Jewish Studies Women’s Caucus Cashmere Subve…
• Association for Jewish Studies First Book Subvention Prize f…