Event Details
Wed 3rd Dec 2025 @ 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Zoom
free
The British Friends of the Hebrew University in partnership with the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London
Invites you to a special lecture with:
Dr Lea Taragin-Zeller
In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land, anthropologist Lea Taragin-Zeller explores how faith, technology, and the state intertwine in shaping one of the most intimate human experiences — the desire to have children. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, she traces how men and women in Israel navigate between religious expectations, medical expertise, and personal longing in their family-making journeys. In this talk, Taragin-Zeller offers a vivid portrait of the hopes, struggles, and moral negotiations that unfold in a society where fertility is both a personal aspiration and a national concern.
Who Will You See There?
Dr Lea Taragin-Zeller is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in religion, gender, science and reproductive politics.
She is 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), University of Cambridge.
Her book “The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land” (NYU Press, 2023) was awarded a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award by the AJS in the category of Social Sciences, Anthropology, and Folklore in 2024. She co-leads "The Reproductive Righteousness Project", an interdisciplinary feminist collaboration on right-wing extremism, "The Jewish Reproduction Working Group", and has ongoing research projects aimed at developing a model of inclusive science and health communication for religious minorities.
The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land
FREE