Description:

Faculty and Grad Student Colloquium:

“Bleeding Boundaries: Ritual Failure and Ritual Negotiation in Niddah Practice," presented by Jewish Studies Graduate Cluster Student and the 2025-2026 Crown Fellow Liza Bernstein

Bleeding Boundaries: Niddah as a Site of Ritual and Identity Exploration - uses the lens of niddah to explore the tensions that emerge when people adapt traditional Jewish ritual to their modern lives. The niddah ritual declares that a person who experiences a discharge of uterine blood - most commonly through menstruation - is impure and must observe a set of rules throughout this period of impurity. In this presentation, I use the framework of ritual failure to analyze how niddah observers’ respond when niddah observance becomes emotionally difficult. From difficulties during childbirth, miscarriages, and general niddah observance, my interlocutors balance their feelings of ritual obligation with the lived difficulty of niddah observance. In this presentation, I explore how the tensions of ritual failure lead my interlocutors to assess and adapt their niddah observance, as ritual failure demands ritual evaluation and (re)negotiation.