Featuring three distinguished historians, Dr. Rachel Kranson, Dr. Ronit Y. Stahl, and Dr. Samira K. Mehta, each of whom will discuss the history of Jews and reproductive freedom in the United States and the ways forward for reproductive freedom in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe V. Wade.

This event will be in-person in Conference Rooms 303 and 305 in the International Center as well as livestreamed on YouTube.

Complimentary lunch to follow outside between the International Center and Wells Hall from 1:00 – 2:00 pm.

Dr. Rachel Kranson is the director of the Jewish Studies Program and an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (Honorable Mention, Best First Book Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2017) and a co-editor of A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America (finalist, National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies, 2010). Her current book project, Religious Misconceptions: American Jews and the Politics of Abortion, traces the history of American Jews’ engagement in the struggle for reproductive rights and access.

Dr. Ronit Y. Stahl an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the religious diversity cluster of the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of
Religion. Currently a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics, she is working on a new book, Troubling Conscience: Religious Freedom and Health Care in Modern America, which examines the long history of religious hospitals, government funding, and conscience rights in the United States. She is the author of the award-winning Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Dr. Samira K. Mehta is an associate professor of women and gender studies and of Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.