Cara Rock-Singer examines what reproductive processes reveal about religious and political life and shows how Jewish tradition is transmitted and reinvented through the ongoing labor of reproduction.

“We gestate each other, even daughters and mothers, around the spool of time not the lineal thread.”

In this short essay, written from my perspective as a Jewish feminist, I draw together a plurality of engagements with natality to engender new conversations in political theology.

Given the history of othering and control of women’s bodies, it may surprise you to learn that the mikveh has become a central site of Jewish feminist, and more recently, queer and trans activism. Across the United States, Canada, and Israel, participants in a grassroots Modern Mikveh Movement have been collectively reclaiming what many have considered to be among the most irredeemable misogynistic forms of bodily disciplining.