Mara H. Benjamin
Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies; Chair, Jewish Studies Program 
Mount Holyoke College

Mara H. Benjamin is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in modern Jewish thought and religious studies from Stanford University. Her 2018 book, The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Indiana) received the 2019 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective category, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 2018. She is also the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009). Her current book project is entitled Terrestrial: Jewish Thought and a World Disrupted. 

Selected Publications

“‘There is no ‘away:’” Ecological Fact as Jewish Theological Problem,” Religions 13:4 (2022). Special issue: Jewish Thought in Times of Crisis, ed. Elias Sacks and Andrea Dara Cooper.

“Tracing the Contours of a Half Century of Jewish Feminist Theology.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36:1 (Spring 2020), 11-31.

The Obligated Self: Material Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Indiana, 2018)