Additional Positions
Director of Jewish Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
Meet Dr. Rachel Kranson
Meet Dr. Rachel Kranson is the director of Jewish Studies and associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A scholar of post-WWII American Jewish history, gender, and sexuality, she is the co-editor of A Jewish Feminine Mystique: Jewish Women in Postwar America (2010, National Jewish Book Award finalist) and Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (2017, Immigrant and Ethnic History Society First Book Award finalist). Dr. Kranson has held fellowships at the Frankel Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and her writing has appeared in such venues as The Washington Post, Lilith, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, American Jewish History, Journal of Jewish Identities, the T&T Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion, among others. Dr. Kranson has held leadership positions at the Jewish Women’s Archive, the Center for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Association for Jewish Studies. Her current book manuscript, tentatively titled Religious Misconceptions, focuses on American Jewish engagement in abortion politics during the era of Roe V. Wade.
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“From Woman’s Right to Religious Freedom: The Woman’s League for Conservative Judaism and the Politics of Abortion.” In Devotions and Desires: Histories of Religion and Sexuality in the 20th Century United States, edited by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018, 170-192
- Reprinted in the T&T Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, Peters and Kamitsuka, eds. -
“Sexuality in American Jewish History: The State of An Emerging Subfield,” American Jewish History, 104.4, October 2020, 493-513
- “History Shows that the First Amendment Should Protect Abortion,” The Washington Post: Made by History, May 12, 2022
Selected Amicus Briefs/Court Submissions
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Individual Members of the Indiana Medical Licensing Board et al v. Anonymous Plaintiff, et al. #22A-PL-02938 (Indiana Court of Appeals, 2023) (co-author and co-signer of Amicus Curiae Brief of Certain Scholars of Jewish Studies and Religion in support of petitioner)
- Individual Members of the Indiana Medical Licensing Board et al v. Anonymous Plaintiff, et al. #22A-PL-02938 (Indiana Court of Appeals, 2023) (co-author and co-signer of Amicus Curiae Brief of Historians of Religion, Reproduction, and the Law in support of petitioner)