Lea Taragin-Zeller is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in religion, gender, reproductive politics and science communication. She is an 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) at the University of Cambridge. Over the years, she has developed a comparative and interdisciplinary research method to examine state-minority politics on different scalar levels. She is author of The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (2023, NYU Press), which ethnographically analyzes how Orthodox Jews reorient conflicting social, religious, and national desires amidst shifting forms in Israel’s reproductive governance.

Lea co-leads the international working group on Jewish Reproduction at The Center for Jewish History (CJH), “The Reproductive Righteousness Project,” an interdisciplinary feminist collaboration on right-wing extremism and the Religion and Reproductive Politics Public Speaker Series, sponsored by Luce-AAR. Lea has ongoing projects aimed at developing a model of inclusive science communication for religious minorities. While scholars have highlighted how science communication reifies forms of structural inequality, especially race and gender, her work examines the challenges science communication pose for religious minorities, offering insights to the processes and prices of tailoring science for religious publics.

She tweets @leataragin