Samira K. Mehta

About Prof. Mehta:

Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of 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 America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. Oprah Daily called her second book, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging (Beacon Press, 2023) “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.”

Mehta’s current book, God Bless the Pill? Sexuality, Contraception, and American Religion 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. God Bless the Pill is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Mehta is also the Principal Investigator on Jews of Color: Histories and Futures, funded with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. She also is beginning an academic monograph on Jews of color in the United States for Princeton University Press.

She is the co-chair of the North American Religions Program Unit of the American Academy of Religion and the co-editor of the Feminist Studies in Religion Blog. She is also on the academic advisory board of the Jewish Women's Archive. Mehta is excited to step into the role of series editor for NYU Press's North American Religion series in the Spring of 2025.

Mehta has been a Research Associate in Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program and has held fellowships from the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sloan Foundation’s Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, the American Jewish Archives, and the Northeastern Regional Fellowship Consortium, among others.

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 Taught: 

• Jewish Feminisms: From Labor Marches to Women’s Marches (WGST 3702-002)
• Religion and Reproductive Politics in the United States (WGST/JWST 4200)

Recent and Forthcoming Publications (Selected):

The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging (Beacon Press, 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).