About
Lea Taragin-Zeller is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in religion, gender, science and reproductive politics. She is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an affiliated scholar at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. Lea has published in leading international journals, such as American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology, Science Communication and Public Understanding of Science. Her work has been generously supported by The Israel Science Foundation (ISF), The International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), The DAAD and American Academy of Religion-Henry Luce Foundation. Her book “The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land” (NYU Press, 2023) was awarded a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award by the AJS in the category of Social Sciences, Anthropology, and Folklore in 2024.
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Over the years, she has developed a comparative and interdisciplinary research method to examine state-minority politics on different scalar levels. Her book “The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land” (NYU Press, 2023) ethnographically analyzes the ways Orthodox Jews reorient conflicting social, religious, and national desires amidst shifting forms in Israel’s reproductive governance. More recently, she has been studying Jewish-Muslim interfaith initiatives to analyse how female migrants and minorities come together vis-à-vis political and social transformations in a growing Islamaphobic and antisemitic Britain.
She co-leads "The Reproductive Righteousness Project", an interdisciplinary feminist collaboration on right-wing extremism, "The Jewish Reproduction Working Group", and has ongoing research projects aimed at developing a model of inclusive science and health communication for religious minorities. Prior to joining The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she completed her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology at HUJI, which was followed by postdoctoral research at the Technion and the University of Cambridge.