Scenting Abrahamic Masculinities, 2021

Religion and Gender, 2012

(USA) and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion and gender, (post)-Holocaust studies, and reconciliation studies. He is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. Publications include Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford), Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism (London), and Remembrance and Reconciliation (Yale).

A review of Sarah Imhoff's Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism for H-Judaic.

American Jewish History, 2013

Gender Forum: Gender and Jewish Culture, 2008

"Concentrating on the foundations of monotheistic religions, Magda Romanska’s contribution “Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity” re-evaluates the covenant between Abraham and God from a gender perspective. Drawing on Derrida and Kierkegaard, she analyses the male ethics of self-sacrifice as well as the gendered connection between death and wisdom. In an analysis of Sarah’s part in the story she then describes the systematic exclusion of women from the covenant with God, and hence from the possibility of becoming an ethical subject within this logic. The mechanisms through which this exclusion is achieved are shown to be manifold – the ritual of circumcision, binding men to each other and collectively to God, is elaborated on alongside the narrative silencing of Sarah and Abrahams privilege of being able to hear the voice of God. Sarah’s death, in this context, operates on a very different level than the sacrifice requested of Abraham and reveals that the only path to the divine open for women is to become the subject-object of sacrifice." - Editorial, Gender Forum: Gender and Jewish Culture, 2008

Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 2006

Though elements of the patriarchy pre-date Judaism, its emergence as an organized theology and social system is unique to the Jewish people. For millennia, biblical exegesis has underwritten not only patriarchal authority, but history itself. However, the veracity of the Bible as both a moral and historical authority has been challenged not only by an objective science of archaeology, but by historical inquiry free of religious and gender-biased presuppositions. This is salutary for women, since the patriarchy – traced, as it is, back to its metaphoric roots in the biblical person and authority of Abraham – has been the philosophical and practical foundation of women’s subservient status through its iterations as Christianity and Islam

Religion and Gender, 2011

Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2014

This article is a comparative consideration of Morehouse College president and public theologian Benjamin Elijah Mays and novelist Richard Wright . Their respective views on modernism were developed through a gendered lens of black Southern masculinity and religion that each experienced during his formative childhood. Mays and Wright responded differently to theism and Christianity. They also responded differently to the mothering women in their lives-one with affection, the other with disaffection. Both Mays and Wright viewed modernism as a means of navigating the political hegemony embodied by white males. Yet, they each reproduced the modernist heterosexism, unwittingly supporting the subordination of the women who mothered them. a masculinist, modern interpretation of Christianity, while Wright reflected secular Marxism. Each broke with premodern mores to vindicate the race and provide direction to an ongoing struggle to achieve "full manhood rights. "