About

Cara Rock-Singer is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan's Department of Studying Religion. She is a scholar of Judaism, science, and technology, with a particular focus on gender and American Judaism. Her academic journey began with a major in molecular biology, which she complemented with religion classes, leading her to explore the intersections of religion and science. Her research interests include gender and reproduction, and she employs ethnography as a method to immerse herself in communities and explore American Jewish life through multiple intellectual traditions such as rabbinics, feminist thought, and modern science. Her work involves a creative and exploratory approach, combining ethnography with midrash, a rabbinic interpretative technique, which she terms 'ethnodrashy.' This method uses midrash as a textual technology to challenge and disrupt common narratives about gender, politics, and religion. She is working on her second book project, 'Inherited Futures: The American Jewish Life of Genetics and Epigenetics,' which examines how modern science and technology influence Jewish collective identity. This project investigates new kinship practices, ritual communities supporting BRCA carriers, and media representations of epigenetic inheritance of Holocaust trauma, shedding light on the role of biological science in shaping contemporary Jewish life in America.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Religious studies
• Law
• Gender studies
• Theology
• History
• Epistemology
• Art
• Literature
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Book Review: Deena Aranoff, Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture

  Contemporary Jewry · 2026-02-27

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• Gestating Judaism

  2026-01-01

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• Educating for the New Jerusalem to Deliver the Messianic Age: A Fabulative Friendship with Louis Finkelstein and James Baldwin

  The Jewish Quarterly Review · 2025-06-01

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  Abstract: James Baldwin (1924–87) and Rabbi Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991) never met, but they shared symbols of critique and redemption, first-century Rome and a New Jerusalem, respectively. Furthermore, they both identified public education as an essential site for achieving a messianic future for the American nation. This essay examines a selection of their writings and speeches to show how Baldwin and Finkelstein mobilized politically and theologically potent symbols of exploitation, materialism, and violence to diagnose the injustices embedded in American society and chart paths for more just and secure futures for their communities. In conversation with Baldwin and Finkelstein, we examine how their theologies can be used to draw out the problematics of and offer correctives to what contemporary scholars have identified as American secularism. By staging an intellectual friendship between two thought leaders who contended with the limitations of American narratives of freedom and equality, we identify not only the problematics of a white Protestant category but also tools emerging from Jewish and Black traditions for forging alternative just futures.

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• Meeting Moses Mendelssohn at the Mikveh: an Ethnodrashy

  Method & Theory in the Study of Religion · 2025-03-20

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  Abstract This paper is a methodological response to the dominance of masculinist, logocentric, and discursive frameworks for the “modern” “scientific” study of religion. By combining feminist theory, rabbinic texts, and modern Jewish thought with ethnographic accounts of American Jewish women’s intimate embodied lives, I playfully contort the relations among subjects and objects of religious studies. In so doing, I ask how the commingling of multiple modalities of textual engagement can meet the present moment in the study of religion.

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• Immersion: The Jewish Ritual Bath and the Media of Protestant Modernity

  2024-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Book Review: The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land by Lea Taragin-Zeller The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land. By Taragin-ZellerLea. New York: New York University Press, 2023, 200 pp., $28.00 (paper).

  Gender & Society · 2024-09-01

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• 108. Queer Mikveh (Massachusetts, 2016–2019)

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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• 108 Queer Mikveh. Massachusetts, 2016–2019

  New York University Press eBooks · 2023-10-31

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• Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross

  American Religion · 2022

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  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Religious studies

  Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross Cara Rock-Singer Rachel B. Gross, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Rachel B. Gross’s Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice is a crucial intervention into what can best be described as doggedly normative narratives of religious authenticity that have dominated the scholarship, and popular understandings, of American Jewish religion. Within religious studies and Jewish studies, the problematic fit of Judaism into the white, Protestant-inflected category of religion is well-established. Historians of American religion have drawn out the extent to which narratives of religious declension are predicated on androcentric and racialized assumptions about what religion is and where, how, and by whom it is practiced. Nevertheless, in American Jewish studies, these narratives persist. Beyond the Synagogue draws on lived religion methodology to rethink the divide between Jewish religion and culture as well as history and memory. Gross defines religion “as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships,” adapting Robert Orsi’s and Kathryn Lofton’s emphases on “relationships and structures” that bind people to kin and community, both living and ancestral (6). In turn, Gross sets her sights on “the mundane practices” and seemingly secular institutions engaged in “buying and selling certain items [that] connect[] people to religious networks through [End Page 138] affective norms” (7). The book argues that practices of “nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish pasts function[] as a mitzvah (literally, commandment),” a term she uses expansively to reflect the way the category is invoked in Jewish law (halakha) as well as colloquially to refer to “good deed[s]” (7–8). Based on ethnographic participant-observation, interviews, and close readings of material culture and digital media, Gross tells a new story of American Judaism as it has developed from the 1970s to the present that privileges emotional rather than textual claims to Jewish authenticity. In doing so, Gross paints a more inclusive picture of the landscape of American Jewish religion. The first chapter positions American Jewish religion within twentieth- and twenty-first-century social scientific and historical narratives about the decline of religious institutions, rise of the “nones,” and secularism and assimilation. Gross also historicizes nostalgia within modern gendered histories of Protestant piety, the white ethnic revivals of the 1960s, and US public history’s increasingly affective engagement with the past. She identifies the 1970s as a period of transformation in “how [American Jewish nostalgia] has been organized and standardized and how it has become a central way of being Jewish” (32). After laying out her methodological intervention and theorizing the category of nostalgia, the book proceeds through a series of four chronologically organized and thematically overlapping case studies. Chapter two examines Jewish participation in a popular American pastime, family genealogical research. Gross’s analysis reveals how the “shared religious framework of intimate and authoritative nostalgia,” whether drawn from family lore, ship manifests, or DNA evidence, is interpellated into Jewish “memorial activities, literary forms, and historical accounts” (43). In chapter three, Gross moves beyond the synagogue as such to examine synagogue restoration projects that gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that heritage spaces are carefully curated to produce ambivalent “elegiac nostalgia” that celebrates financial progress out of poverty as it romanticizes spiritually rich bygone eras. At synagogues-turned-museums, which are haunted by ghosts of the past, docents, tourists, and attendees of prayer quorums negotiate knowledge, meaning, and proper practice. Chapters four and five focus on children’s material culture and Ashkenazi foodways, respectively. Though nostalgia is “often assumed to be a condition of aging,” Gross shows how in the first decades of the twenty-first century children and parents used books and dolls, especially those distributed and produced by PJ Library and American Girl, to form intimate, affectionate relationships to ancestors and their stories. Chapter five examines the twenty-first-century Jewish food revival, focusing on how restaurateurs have improvised on Jewish Deli cuisine. The “playful and campy nostalgia” (161) of culinary revivals centers the gut—the belly laugh or the full belly—as the way to the...

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• Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher

  Journal of Jewish identities · 2021-01-01

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  Reviewed by: Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher Cara Rock-Singer Michal S. Raucher. Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020. Pp. ix–xiv, 228. Paperback $24. ISBN: 9780253050021. Michal Raucher’s Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women is an ethnographic account of Haredi women’s embodied reproductive ethics. Conceiving Agency is based on two years of fieldwork in Jerusalem, Israel, which involved participant and nonparticipant observation in homes, prenatal clinics, educational settings, and the anti-abortion organization EFRAT. In addition, Raucher conducted multiple interviews with Haredi women who had at least three children, and with doctors, nurses, and doulas (labor coaches). From this rich and varied ethnography emerges a compelling story of a “paradox” of how Haredi women exert agency during pregnancy and birth, despite the fact that these life cycle events are highly regulated by a “matrix of control” of rabbinic and medical authorities as well as state and charitable institutions. As Raucher argues, repeated reproductive experiences and theological commitments, together, “empower” women to claim agency over their own reproductive decisions (3–4). The book adds significant nuance to scholarship on Haredi Jewry and Jewish ethics, which have both centered on texts and their predominantly male interpreters as the locus of religious authority. Raucher instead focuses her study on the embodiment and lived experience of pregnant and birthing [End Page 249] women, and in doing so, she also contributes to the ethnography of reproduction in Israel. She shows how books and bodies; God, men, and women; and segulot (folk practices) and medical technologies all take part in embodied reproductive ethics. Raucher’s argument builds through a series of five chapters. The first two chapters lay out the context in which Haredi reproductive agency can emerge. In chapter one, Raucher explores the roles of doctors and rabbis, who compete for authority as they collaborate to control Haredi women’s reproductive decisions. As doctors and rabbis negotiate their epistemological and cultural systems, “secular” and “religious” authorities make accommodations to each other’s values and needs, but in serving their own social and economic interests, Haredi women’s experiences are “overlooked” (43). The overbearing competition among authorities initially serves as an “obstacle,” but ultimately leaves these women “space” to make their own reproductive choices. The second chapter explores the “pathway” through which women come to develop reproductive agency in a culture where the rabbinic textual tradition and its male interpreters claim authority over all domains of life, including the reproductive lives of women. Raucher argues that women display pregnancy advice books, as symbols of legitimate textual authority, even as they subvert the importance of book-based knowledge and rely on their own embodied experiences to make prenatal decisions. By doing a textual analysis of two popular pregnancy advice books, Raucher shows how these books present frameworks for integrating religion and medicine, which help women cultivate confidence in their own reproductive agency. Chapters three and four represent the heart of Raucher’s ethnographic engagement with the core concept of reproductive agency. Following Saba Mahmood, Raucher defines agency as “capacity for action,” which emerges within the constraints of a patriarchal society where secular and religious competition and gender segregation also create freedom for women’s independence to make reproductive choices (95). By framing pregnancy as repeated, “bodily ritual” (102), Raucher argues that, by their third or fourth pregnancies, women come to understand pregnancy as a religious identity, akin to Torah scholar, and to cultivate authority over reproductive decisions based on their own embodied experiences. Chapter four clarifies and complicates this picture through engagement with the theological underpinnings of embodied authority, namely, that “pregnancy [is] a time of authority due to women’s unique connection to God” (117). Raucher shows how women deemphasize rabbinic knowledge while amplifying and reinterpreting traditions that link pregnancy to the messianic return and the physiology of pregnant bodies as tools for God’s creation. Rather than turn to rabbinic authorities, they rely on themselves and God: women invoke the theological concepts of hishtadlut and bitachon, which they use to mean human actions and God’s interventions, to negotiate prenatal decisions. In the fifth chapter, Raucher draws on...

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