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Rebecca Epstein-Levi

Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and the author of When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2023). She has written for Bitch MediaThe RevealerDisability ActsAlmaReligion DispatchesFeminist Studies in Religionthe Jewish Theological Seminary’s newsletter GleaningsStyleWise Blog, and State of Formation. In her copious free time, she enjoys cooking unnecessarily complicated meals and sharpening her overly large collection of kitchen knives. You can find her at RJELevi.com, or follow her on Bluesky at @rjelevi.bsky.social, where she spends half her time tweeting about her work and the other half of her time split between tweeting about neurodivergence, her cats, Faintly Macabre and Chroma the Great, food, and screaming into the void.

Essays

Trans Talmud Reminds Us Things Aren’t Forever Doomed to Suck

Max Strassfeld’s groundbreaking Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature is a masterclass in denaturalizing oppressive structures. As political backlash against trans folk continues its deadly escalation, Trans Talmud is a crucial intervention in both scholarly and explicitly political domains.

Risk

Official responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have encouraged us to understand risk in individual terms. They’re wrong: risk is all about interdependence.