The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (2018) puts maternal experience into constructive conversation with central themes in Jewish theology. It joins other innovative volumes in the New Jewish Thought and Philosophy series at Indiana University Press.

The physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful — but largely unexplored — terrain for feminists.

In this book, I demonstrate that attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent needs of young children invites caregivers to grapple with profound religious questions: how can we responsibly use our power in unequal relationships? What is our obligation to respond to human fragility and vulnerability? And how do relationships like those between parents and children reorient our concept of the self? Drawing on Jewish sources from the Talmud to modern philosophy, The Obligated Self takes up the challenge of bringing a theological, feminist perspective to parenting.

2019 American Academy of Religion Award

Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective category

2018 Finalist, National Jewish Book Award

Women’s Studies

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Professor Naomi Seidman and graduate students, University of Toronto

“A richly imagined work that brilliantly captures the complexity and contradictions of the experience of parenting and then uses that experience to shed light on the nature of God .... Few readers will come away from this book without being stimulated, challenged and enlarged by it.”
— Judith Plaskow, Author, Standing Again at Sinai
“One of the most creative projects in Jewish feminist thought in a long while. Benjamin turns a feminist examination of maternal subjectivity into a critical lens for Jewish thinking about the self. She draws on a wide range of resources, beginning with biblical and rabbinic texts, putting them into conversation with modern Jewish thought and various types of feminist literature to create as rich and deep a Jewish conversation as possible.”
— Charlotte Fonrobert, author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender

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