The Modern Mikveh Movement: The Ritual Bath and the Politics of Jewish Bodily Technology

“The Modern Mikveh Movement: The Ritual Bath and the Politics of Jewish Bodily Technology” will explore the activities of a growing collection of grassroots projects across North America, Israel, and beyond. This movement is distinguished by its work to reclaim what many feminists have considered to be an irredeemably misogynistic form of bodily discipline: post-menstrual immersion in the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath. Through ethnographic immersions into the mikveh, I will show how diverse Jewish subjects enlist a bodily ritual technology to transform not only the self but also communal politics.

Cara Rock-Singer is the Lama Shetzer Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Rock-Singer is also affiliated with the Gender and Women's Studies Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program. Her book manuscript, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press, Class 200 Series.