While much Jewish thought, culture, and professional ethics increasingly accommodate a range of gender roles and expressions, sexualities, and family structures, they also remain deeply pronatalist. This overwhelmingly frames reproduction as a core Jewish value and the choice not to bear or raise children as contrary to Jewish values. I argue that Jewish pronatalism masks the true extent to which the whole community must support the care and formation of all its generations. Through a counter‐reading of a passage from the Babylonian Talmud in which three sages neglect their wives and children in various ways that allow a careful reader to notice “person‐shaped holes”—narrative features whose presence implies various people’s nonparental labor—I argue that multiple people in multiple roles within a community make it possible to sustain its continuity in a robust and all‐encompassing way.

Regnant public accounts of Jewish sexual ethics—both external and internal—fall short of what they could accomplish. Using a Twitter thread on sexual ethics which falls into some key errors as a case study, I argue that Jewish ethicists are poised to address the thread's errors by offering sources for alternative moral frameworks. I examine how thinking with this Twitter thread can help us clarify what we mean by public scholarship more generally, what is wrong with some common public deployments of specifically Jewish sources, and some implications of this for both Jewish and non‐Jewish publics. I conclude with some reflections about the role of traditional academic venues, such as the Journal of Religious Ethics, within this.

The chapter examines genetic engineering through analogy with the Torah: if Judaism permits rabbis, in some very specific circumstances, to alter the text of the sacred Torah, might it not also permit alteration of the “sacred text” of a plant’s genome? The chapter carefully plots these specific circumstances and their plant-based analogues to argue, with a comparison of genetic and scriptural languages, for respectful “dialogical engagement” to promote human and nonhuman flourishing. While not offering a clear answer to a challenging issue, the purpose is to establish the beginning of a religiously and textually attentive ethical framework with which to evaluate genetic technology.

This dialogue brings together work on Rabbinic Judaism and Roman Catholicism to introduce the economic and feminist implications of the authors’ respective chapters on genetically modified organisms and Catholic environmental ethics. The authors frame ecological thriving, technological development, and the relation between the two as feminist concerns. Further, they consider the potential and/or limits of their source traditions for feminist engagement. Their discussion affirms the importance of naming unjust power structures, while cautioning against preemptive restrictions that may inhibit promising research and therefore undermine efforts to address injustice. This dialogue illuminates both the potential for innovation and the challenges in comparative religious ethical dialogue.