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Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert
Associate Professor and Graduate Director of Religious Studies

Biography

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert's research interests include gender in Jewish culture, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy, the connection between religion and space, and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to Greco-Roman culture. Fonrobert is an associate professor in the department of Religious Studies who specializes in Judaism, especially Talmudic literature and culture. Her work is devoted to rabbinic literature and especially the Babylonian Talmud. Her first book, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000), won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a project about the significance of the eruv, entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.  Fonrobert is also co-director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and affiliated with the Urban Studies program.

Key Works

• Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.  In progress.
• Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature.  Ed. and introduction with Martin Jaffee.  Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender.  Stanford University Press, 2001.
• "A Mikvah for Feminists"
• "Cultivating a Multivocal Rabbinic Tradition"

Prof. Fonrobert in the News

• In Judaism, ‘What is Legitimate Violence?’
  Stanford Magazine, March/April 2003