I am an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, jointly appointed in the Jewish Studies Program and the Science and Technology Studies Department. I received my B.A. in Molecular Biology from Princeton (2009), M.St. in Theology with a focus on Religion and Science from Oxford (2010), and my Ph.D. (2018) from Columbia University's Religion Department. As a scholar of North American Religions, my research and teaching center on Jewish religion, science and technology, and gender in the contemporary United States.
I am the author of Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2026).
From the University of Chicago Press:
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.