Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lectures

An Evening with the Rock-Singers
 

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Time:  5:30pm

Location: Kelley Presentation Room
 

Title: Religion and Politics in Mandatory Palestine: The Roots of the Israeli and Palestinian       
          Religious Right Today
 

Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer is a transnational historian of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on Islamic and Jewish movements that fuse religion and politics, Dr. Rock-Singer is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute and teaches courses in Judaic Studies, Middle East Studies, and History.

Dr. Rock-Singer received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), his M.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2010) and his PhD from Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies (2016). Dr. Rock-Singer's research draws on mass and small media to trace the changing relationship between religion, politics and society in the 20th-century Middle East.  His first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and the Islamic Revival was published by Cambridge University Press (2019) and his second book, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East, by the University of California Press (2022). He is currently at work on a third monograph, tentatively entitled Worshipping the Nation:  Exclusivist Politics in Mandatory Palestine, 1917-48. Bridging Islamic and Judaic Studies, as well as histories of Mandate Palestine with those of transnational Islamic reform, Worshipping the Nation draws on Arabic and Hebrew-language sources to trace the linked emergence of Islamic and Jewish religion-political visions under the British Mandate.
 

RECEPTION – 6:15-7
 

Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Scholar-in-Residence Lecture

Time: 7:00pm

Location: Kelley Presentation Room

Title: Reproducing Judaism: How Jewish Tradition is Remade through the Everyday Lives of
          American Jews

While Judaism is often thought about as a religion that happens in and through synagogues, ancient texts, and rabbis, this talk will explore American Judaism as a living, growing tradition that is maintained through bodies. “Reproducing Judaism” will show how American Jews of different ages, sexual identities, and levels of observance participate in the creative, reproductive labor of nurturing religious tradition.

Dr. Cara Rock-Singer is the Lama Shetzer Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also affiliated with the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program.

She is the author of Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2026). This book examines how Jewish women utilize gendered bodily technologies to challenge normative structures within American and Israeli religious life. Dr. Rock-Singer is currently working on her second book project, Inherited Futures: The American Jewish Life of Genetics and Epigenetics, which incorporates her undergraduate research on genetics and epigenetics into her research on contemporary Judaism. Specifically, Inherited Futures investigates how modern science and technology have created novel forms of Jewish religion: new kinship practices that aimed to eliminate Tay Sachs, ritual communities that lend spiritual support to BRCA carriers, and popular media that has inculcated belief in epigenetic inheritance of Holocaust trauma. This book will shed new light on the role of biological science in imagining Jewish collective identity in 20th-century America.
 

Supported by Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Foundation