Meet the Frankel Center’s newest faculty member! Andrea Gondos began her role as the Center’s Padnos Family Professor in Jewish Thought in Fall 2025, offering a course titled “Jewish Spirituality in Movies, Music, and Pop Culture.” To help our community get to know her better, we asked Gondos a few questions about her career and ongoing research.
How did you first become interested in this area of research?
The occult, the mystical dynamics of the seen and unseen worlds, have always fascinated me, and when I decided to do my graduate education in Jewish studies, Kabbalah–or Jewish mysticism–became almost immediately my chosen area of focus. My doctoral project probed questions of book history, the technological innovation of print, and new ways of reading Jewish mystical sources. As a technological and material innovation, print made broad dissemination of Jewish esoteric ideas possible and accessible through the production of digests, anthologies, and vernacular complications that could be produced at a significantly lower cost than manuscripts. The 16th-century printing of medieval kabbalistic works, such as the Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendour), along with other kabbalistic classics, reflected the growing demand not only within early modern Jewish society, but also by an emerging Christian readership, interested in the teachings and ideas of Kabbalah. At the same time, printing could only partially open this corpus of esoteric knowledge, with its idiosyncratic language, mythology, and religious symbolism. New Jewish authors, who frequently worked as educators in the Jewish community, seized this unique cultural opportunity to develop literary and conceptual solutions that helped readers navigate the challenges of these esoteric texts. In my doctoral work I was profoundly interested in understanding knowledge organization and transmission through the test case of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism.
What’s your favorite thing about it?
In the Jewish tradition, the Torah has frequently been compared to water, underscoring both its propensity to nourish and its endlessness, particularly as ocean or sea, symbolizing the vast possibilities of interpretation it can generate. When discussing the splitting of the Red Sea during the Exodus, the medieval mystical classic, the Zohar, remarks that the Torah, like the sea, has both a revealed and a hidden facet. During the Exodus, the natural separation between the hidden and revealed aspects was removed, allowing the Israelites to glimpse the secrets of the heavenly world that are normally left concealed from human consciousness. My favorite thing about studying Judaism, particularly its mystical dimensions, is to have moments, however rare, when I find such moments of “glimpsing” and boundary dissolution. This happens often when I am engaged in textual interpretation, meditation, or—and this is the most rewarding—through intense study with students and colleagues. Another rewarding side of studying medieval and early modern Kabbalah is losing oneself in the world of manuscripts. Many of these texts have never been printed or studied before, and some contain intricate diagrams. Spending time with these unique artifacts in libraries worldwide, exploring the scribe’s annotations, his unique way of forming letters, and the materiality of the paper or parchment on which these works received their final shape, present enduring sources of intellectual reward for me.
Why did you choose to come to the University of Michigan?
The University of Michigan is an outstanding university with a reputation for global leadership and research excellence, and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies within the broader university community constitutes a leading academic hub for the study of the Jewish past, life, tradition, and practice. In coming to the University of Michigan, I was particularly excited about joining a globally leading institution with a diverse and large student body, while at the same time becoming part of a distinguished team of Judaic studies scholars. On a more personal note, and parallel to my daily academic track, I am eager to discover the region’s abundant waterways, green fields, forests, and national parks, and to contribute to Ann Arbor’s lively and diverse community!
Why do you think it is important to study this area of research?
Over the past decade or so, the humanities have been increasingly marginalized and forced to retreat in universities. However, if we survey the history of universities, from the Middle Ages onward, educational curricula always revolved around achieving a balance between the liberal arts, represented by the fields of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the more exact sciences, such as mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and surprisingly, music. The study of Kabbalah or Jewish esotericism falls squarely into the area of the receding humanities. However, what many do not realize is that Kabbalah, in both its theoretical and practical aspects, intersects with numerous cognate fields: Bible commentary, rabbinic midrash, philosophy, philology, Christian Hebraism, medicine, and sometimes even science and technology. The history of Jewish mysticism is not a marginal phenomenon but has constituted for centuries a vital and frequently a revitalizing aspect of the Jewish tradition. Kabbalists throughout history were also important communal leaders and worked as physicians or judges in Jewish society. Studying Kabbalah opens vistas for a renewed understanding of core Jewish texts and practices while also contributing to a broader interdisciplinary discourse.
Why do you think it’s important to study Judaic Studies/Humanities in general?
Let me answer this question with a flashback to my undergraduate commencement. The faculty valedictorian at the ceremony, a professor of English literature with whom I took several classes, framed the importance of the humanities by asking the audience to imagine becoming castaways following a shipwreck with nothing more than a small boat, two or three companions, and a bit of food and water. As this small group of desperate stranded individuals awaits rescue, they each begin telling a story. The stories and the storytelling nurture their sense of hope and keep them strong until help arrives. Ultimately, the humanities are the repositories of the stories of humankind—through them we can understand our past, adapt and change existing discourses and paradigms, and shape a better and more wholesome future.Within universal human history, the Jewish past occupies a special place of study, offering enduring solutions to pressing questions from Biblical to contemporary times. For instance, the ancient rabbinic text, the Talmud, has already grappled with perennial issues such as the relationship between humankind and the universe including the natural world populated by plants, trees, herbs, and animals. The Talmud repeatedly emphasizes the holistic and enmeshed nature of existence, stressing the role of human responsibility in caring for the created world, whether this entails providing food for animals before feeding ourselves or not killing a bird with its young.
How has your work evolved since you first started your career?
My doctoral dissertation and first postdoctoral appointment delved into the question of how Kabbalah was popularized in the 16th and early 17th centuries, shortly after the printing of medieval kabbalistic classics for the first time in 16th-century Italy. I was particularly interested in uncovering how print technology impacted the circulation, study, and absorption of Jewish mystical lore.During my postdoctoral tenure at the Free University in Berlin, I was part of a research group that examined and critically analyzed Jewish magic and practical Kabbalah preserved in over 100 manuscripts written in East-Central Europe between 1550 and 1850. This research project shifted my research trajectory and brought me into contact with the rich and frequently syncretistic world of Jewish magic, healing, and medicine. Within the broader project, I developed a unique focus on women, issues of (in)fertility, and magical or medical techniques that addressed this problem. I have published several articles from this project, and am currently writing a book based on my research findings.
What courses do you teach and what do you want them to take away from them?
In the fall, I am excited to teach a course titled, “Jewish Spirituality in Movies, Music, and Pop Culture,” which will explore the ways in which pop culture has absorbed and popularized the ideas, symbols, and practices of premodern Jewish mysticism on a global scale. In the winter term, I plan to offer a course on the concepts of death and afterlife in Judaism, tentatively titled, “Jewish Horror: Death, Reincarnation, and the Afterlife in Judaism,” and another class focused on the wide-ranging attitudes Jews have propagated toward the body, health, and medicine from the Bible to premodern times, tentatively called, “Medicine, Magic, and the Jewish Body.”
What is going to be your next project?
I am currently writing a book titled, Chaining Lilith, Healing Eve: Magical and Medical Techniques of Jewish Birth in the East European Shtetl. The work surveys a vast trove of Jewish how-to manuals/books of secrets, which were written between 1600 to 1850 and preserved today in manuscripts, to illuminate how Jewish male healers managed the (re)generative aspects of the Jewish female body. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Chaining Lilith brings Greek medical theories into conversation with early modern Jewish herbalism, and kabbalistic ideas with magical technologies—amulets, incantations, and spells. The book will shed further light on the now-lost world of Jewish itinerant healers and wonderworkers (ba’alei shem), who offered a counterculture to the dominant rabbinic paradigm in early modern East-Central Europe. Collating and analyzing thousands of recipes for facilitating love and sexual potency, pregnancy, and an easy birth, the book reveals the centrality of women’s bodies in constructing and shaping Jewish social and religious ideals in East-Central Europe on the eve of modernity.
