Samira Mehta

Areas of research related to Jewish Studies:

Contemporary American Judaism; Interfaith Marriage; the Jewish Family in the United States; Religion, Reproduction, and Politics; Judaism and Sexuality; Religious Diversity in the United States

Courses: 

Jewish Feminisms: From Labor Marches to Women’s Marches (WGST 3702-002), Religion and Reproductive Politics in the United States

Recent Publications:

God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America (under contract with UNC Press)

The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays (forthcoming from Beacon Press, October 2023)

"Asian American Jews, Race, and Religious Identity,” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2021).

“The Changing Jewish Family: Jewish Communal Responses to Interfaith and Same-Sex Marriage,” with Brett Krutzsch. American Jewish History (2020).

“Christmas in the Room: Gender, Conflict, and Compromise in Multi-Religious Domestic Space,” Religions 11 (2020).

“Prescribing the Diaphragm: Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and a Changing Culture of Contraception,” American Religion (2020).

“You are Jewish if You Want to Be: The Limits of Identity in a World of Multiple Religious Practices,” in Beyond Jewish Identity, eds. Jon Levisohn and Ari Y. Kelman (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2019).

Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian–Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

“Religion, Modernity, and Assimilation in America” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

“Race and American Judaism,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

“Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20^thCentury United States, eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 152-169.

“Chrismukkah: Multicultural Millennialism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 25, no. 1 (2015): 82-109.

“I Chose Judaism, but Christmas Cookies Chose Me:  Food, Identity, and Familial Religious Practice in Christian/Jewish Blended Families,” in Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, ed. Benjamin E. Zeller et al  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

About Prof. Mehta:

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender 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 Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She is also the author of a newly released book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023). 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. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She is a member of the board of Feminist Studies in Religion, where she serves as the co-editor of the blog; co-chairs the steering committee of the North American Religions Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion; and is a Creative Editor at the journal American Religion. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Emory University.