A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Rosenzweig's Bible and The Obligated Self and is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
[2] Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Carl Collins, was born to Jewish parents from Brownsville, Brooklyn, who had previously emigrated from Odesa in present-day Ukraine.
[2][5] She attended Garfield High School, during which, amidst warming Soviet Union–United States relations, she was part of the KING-TV/Gosteleradio Teen Space Bridge project with students in 1988.
[12] In 2017, she moved to Mount Holyoke College, where she had previously worked as an auditor for Mount Holyoke professor Lawrence Fine while studying at Hampshire, and subsequently became the Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies.
[2] Originally frequenting a Conservative synagogue, Benjamin later shifted towards being shomer Shabbat after meeting Kabakov.