samira k. mehta
american religions, families, and politics
How American religious leaders and their congregations debated
—and embraced—
contraception in the postwar era
“An enlightening examination of the tangled intersection of faith, choice, and health in America.”
Publishers Weekly
“Reads like a dream and packs a wallop: The circulation of birth control isn’t the result of godless activists fighting for free sex but that of religious leaders' efforts to meet community needs. Highly recommended.”
Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
is an expert on American religions, families, and politics. Her work explores interfaith, interracial, and multicultural experiences in the United States. She offers public lectures and workshops on:
DR. SAMIRA K. MEHTA
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Focusing on moments of collaboration and tension among American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, Dr. Mehta details how mid-century religious leaders and communities showed far more support for contraception and abortion than most realize — and that this support was far less feminist than one might hope. She shows that religious support for birth control played a pivotal role in attempts to strengthen upwardly mobile nuclear families, goals deeply rooted in white familial norms and Cold War anti-communist rhetoric.
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Dedicated to recovering, elevating, and amplifying the voices and experiences of people of color within American Jewish community members , Dr. Mehta introduces audiences to the complexity and diversity of this identity. She highlights the ways American Jews’ relationship to white Christian supremacy and white privilege present challenges to community-building and commitments to justice. She also addresses commonly held misconceptions about Jews of color and challenges they experience in American Jewish institutions.
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Popular belief assumes that mixedness gives one the ability to feel at home in more than one culture, but the flipside shows you can feel just as alienated in those spaces. In 7 essays that dissect her own experiences with a frankness tempered by generosity, Dr. Mehta confronts questions about:
authenticity and belonging
conscious and unconscious cultural inheritance
appropriate mentorship
the racism of people who love you (and whom you love)
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Focusing on the Jewish-Christian interfaith family, Dr. Mehta details the history of interfaith marriage in the United States and explores the range of choices that interfaith families make, including choosing to be Jewish or to practice more than one family religious tradition. She explores how families make choices about religious multiplicity and how religious communities can best meet the needs of interfaith families and of adult children of interfaith families who might be looking for religious homes.
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Dr. Mehta shows how Jewish doctors, activists, and clergy played a crucial part in expanding reproductive health care in the United States. She considers the feminist (and not so feminist) rationals of those actors and demonstrates that, as long as there has been activism about reproductive rights, Jews have been involved in the movement.
jews of color
“A Chance to Change the World”
is Dr. Mehta’s current multi-part project focused on recovering, elevating, and amplifying the voices and experiences of people of color within American Jewish communities.
She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Mixed Multitudes: A History of Jews of Color in the United States (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is the Principal Investigator for the Luce Foundation-funded “Jews of Color: Histories and Futures” ethnographic project.
recent commentary & analysis
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Coalition work is messy
Lessons from a History of Compromise and Influence
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Discovering a not-so feminist history
I knew that the past was not feminist. But I hated that the actors who brought about this feminist tool did it, essentially, by accident, and that women had to make it feminist.
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Merry Jewish Christmas
How Chinese food and the movies became a time‑honored tradition for American Jews
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Protestant ideas shaped Americans’ support for birth control
And the Supreme Court ruling protecting a husband and wife’s right to contraception
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From the marriage contract to breaking the glass under the chuppah
Many Jewish couples adapt their weddings to celebrate gender equality
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New doc claiming Columbus was Jewish may have some accuracy issues
But there’s a far bigger issue we need to reckon with
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There is no one ‘religious view’ on abortion
A scholar of religion, gender and sexuality explains
