Mara Benjamin

Mara H. Benjamin is a scholar of modern Jewish religious thought and a constructive Jewish theologian. She teaches and writes at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts), where she is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies. Benjamin’s widely acclaimed 2018 book, The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought, was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Obligated Self received the 2019 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective category. Benjamin is also the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (2009). Her current project, Terrestrial: Jewish Thought and a World Disrupted, analyzes the profound challenges ecological crisis poses to Jewish theology. Benjamin earned her B.A. at Hampshire College, a Diploma in Jewish Studies from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish studies, and a PhD from Stanford University in Religious Studies. She held the Hazel D. Cole Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington and was Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Post-doctoral Fellow in Judaic Studies at Yale University. Before teaching at Mount Holyoke College, Benjamin held a faculty position in the Religion department at St. Olaf College.