I write on a wide variety of topics related to gender, race and ethnicity in American religion, particularly in relation to food and popular culture. I am the author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia University Press 2009), co-editor of Religion, Food and Eating in North America (CUP 2014) and Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family (Rutgers University Press, 2024).

​I have just completed Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in Spring 2026) but am most proud of my investigative piece entitled “The Case of the Missing Matzo” that asked the hard questions, diving into the Manischewitz Tam Tam shortage prior to Pesach in 2008. 

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NEW BOOK ALERT! 


​Books
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Articles and Book Chapters

  • “History in a Jar: The Taste and Trauma of Gefilte Fish” In Food and Memory: Dublin Gastronomy Symposium Proceedings (Dublin, Ireland 2024).
  • ​“’Happy Yom Kippur’: Televising and Translating Atonement.” In Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family, edited by Nora Rubel and Brett Krutzsch (Rutgers University Press, 2024).
  • "‘You can’t make a Yankee of me that way!’; The Settlement Cook Book and Culinary Pluralism in Progressive-Era America,” In Food and Power: Dublin Gastronomy Symposium Proceedings (Dublin, Ireland 2018).
  • "A Jewish Joy of Cooking? How a 20th Century Cookbook Containing Frog’s Legs, Snails, and Ham Became a Beloved Jewish Icon.” In The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, edited by Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson (Boston: Brill University Press, 2015).
  • “Food.” In Key Terms in Material Religion, edited by S. Brent Plate (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
  • "The Feast at the End of the Fast: The Emergence of a New American Jewish Practice." In Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, edited by Benjamin E. Zeller, Marie W. Dallam, Reid Neilson, and Nora Rubel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
    • Reprinted in Leah Hochman, ed., Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States (2017).
  • "Schadenfreude over the Slaughterhouse: Orthodox Judaism in the News." In Oxford Handbook of Religion and the News, edited by Diane Winston. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • “‘Chased Out of Palestine’: Prophet Cherry’s Church of the Living God and the Problem of Black Jewish Origins.” In The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, edited by Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
  • “First Day Quiz.” Teaching Theology and Religion (February 2009).
  • “‘Muggers in Black Coats’: The Alleged Hijacking of American Judaism.” In 350 Years of American Judaism in Popular Culture, edited by Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Ronald A. Simkins. Omaha, Nebraska: Creighton University Press, 2007.
  • “The Nation of Islam in the United States.” In Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in the United States, edited by Eugene V. Gallagher and W. Michael Ashcroft. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
  • “Chicken Soup for the Souls of Black Folk: African American Converts to Judaism and the Negotiation of Identity,” Social Compass: Revue Internationale de Sociologie de la Religion/ International Review of Sociology of Religion. No. 3 (September 2004).


​Public Scholarship

Image: Chester Higgins Jr., Untitled (High Holy Days, Congregation Commandment Keepers, Harlem, New York)
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