Dr. Avital Davidovich Eshed is a senior lecturer at the Jewish Philosophy and Talmud Department and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. Her research concerns the cultural history and religious thought of Medieval Ashkenazi Jews and the history of gender, body, and sexuality in Jewish culture. Her work also concerns the various ways in which gender was incorporated into Jewish-Christian social dynamics and was used in inter-religious polemics.
Her research integrates gender theory into the study of Jewish law, ritual, theology, and myth. Her book 'On Virginity: Body, Sexuality, and Identity in Medieval Jewish Culture', (in Hebrew) is in preparation by Carmel Press (2023).
Dr. Davidovich Eshed is a former WSRP Fellow and visiting scholar and lecturer on Women's Studies and Judaism at Harvard Divinity School (2017-18) and a former post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters - CSOC in Ben Gurion University of the Negev (2015-17).
Along with her Ph.D. studies and academic activity, she was a research fellow at the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem (2009-2021), where she took part in various research groups, think tanks, and programs in the fields of Jewish education, interfaith dialogue and Israeli Palestinian relations in Israel and in the U.S.
