Dr. Rachel Kranson

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, Religious Misconceptions, focuses on American Jewish engagement in abortion politics during the era of Roe V. Wade.