Links to or downloads of work will be provided where available.
Books
From the website:
![A book cover reading "When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics," [by] Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi in block letters in the top left and center. In the right of , there is a photo-negative image of a woman reaching her hand, palm-up, with a come-hither gesture, towards the bottom-center. The background is dark blue with Hebrew and Aramaic text faintly across it.](https://hcommons.org/app/uploads/sites/1001088/2022/07/Epstein-Levi_-When-We-Collide62-copy-1-200x300.jpg)
“When We Collide is a landmark reassessment of the significance of sex in contemporary Jewish ethics. Rebecca Epstein-Levi offers a fresh and vital exploration of sexual ethics and virtue ethics in conversation with rabbinic texts and feminist and queer theory.
Epstein-Levi explores how sex is not a special or particular form of social interaction but one that is entangled with all other forms of social interaction. The activities of sex—doing it, talking about it, thinking about it, regulating it—are sites of ongoing moral formation on individual, interpersonal, and communal levels.
When We Collide explores the development of Jewish sexual ethics, and represents an opportunity to move beyond the usual heteronormative accounts that are presented as though they were neutral representations of what “Judaism teaches about sex.”
Articles
- “Person-Shaped Holes: Childfree Jews, Jewish Ethics, and Communal Continuity.” Journal of Religious Ethics 49:2 (2021)
- “Is Judaism ‘Sex Positive?’ Understanding Trends in Recent Jewish Sexual Ethics.” G’vanim, Volume 10 (2019)
- “A Prescription for Discourse: Power and Expertise in Ritual and Sexual Health.” Journal of Jewish Ethics 4:2 (2018)
- “Textual Relationships: On Perspective, Interpretive Discipline, and Constructive Ethics.” Accepted, Journal of Textual Reasoning.
- “A Polyvocal Body: Mutually Corrective Discourses in Feminist and Jewish Bodily Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics. 43:2 (2015)
- “Community, Authority, and Autonomy: Jewish Resources for the Vaccine Wars.” Journal of the Society for Christian Ethics, 34:1 (2014), 173-88.
Book Chapters
- “’Intertextually Modified Organisms’”: Genetic Engineering, Jewish Ethics, and Rabbinic Text” in That All May Flourish: Comparative Religions and Environmental Ethics, ed. Laura Hartman. Oxford University Press (2018)
Other
- Review of Jewish Justice: The Contested Limits of Nature, Law, and Covenant, David Novak, 2017. Journal of Jewish Ethics 5:1 (2019)
- “Is Judaism ‘Sex Positive?’ Understanding Trends in Recent Jewish Sexual Ethics.”G’vanim, Volume 10 (2019)
- Review of Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics, Jeremiah Unterman, 2017. Journal of Jewish Ethics 4:2 (2018)
- “Toward More Expansive Perspectives on Gender, Authority, and Role Modeling.” JTS Gleanings 5:1 (Spring 2018)
- “Introduction.” Journal of Textual Reasoning 7:1, with Peter Ochs (March 2012)
- “Introduction.” Journal of Textual Reasoning 6:2 (March 2011)