Modern Jewish Thought

Beginning in 2026 I will be offering a series of informal, online seminars on some of the most significant and influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century. The tentative themes include the following:

This module explores Jewish philosophical poetics in the wake of Auschwitz, where poetry, language, and thought confront the limits of representation, meaning, and ethical responsibility. Taking the Holocaust not as a historical backdrop but as a rupture that irreversibly alters the conditions of writing and reading, the seminar examines how post-Auschwitz poetics becomes a site of philosophical, historical, and even autobiographical inquiry as much as literary expression.

We begin with selections from Paul Celan’s poetry, read in Pierre Joris’ and Michael Hamburger’s translations, attending to Celan’s fractured syntax, neologisms, and silence(s) as responses to historical catastrophe and linguistic inheritance. Celan’s work stages poetry as a perilous act of address—one that seeks relation while remaining haunted by the impossibility of speech after atrocity. From Celan, the seminar turns to Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions and The Book of Margins, which reimagine Jewish textual tradition through fragmentation, exile, and endless commentary. Jabès’ work situates the book itself as a site of wandering, where absence, interruption, and questioning become constitutive rather than obstacles to meaning.

Throughout, we will engage critical and philosophical writings by Jacques Derrida and Peter Szondi, whose work grapples with the ethical and formal stakes of writing after Auschwitz. Derrida’s analyses of Celan and Jabès interrogate testimony, secrecy, and the trace, while Szondi’s examine the crisis of genre, lyric, and form under historical pressure.

Above all, we will consider how post-Auschwitz Jewish poetics negotiates memory, silence, and address, asking what it means to write—and to read—when language itself bears the weight of historical catastrophe.

2026 Tentative Reading Schedule

• July 18 – Celan: “Todesfuge”/”Death Fugue” (H 31) (J 46), “Espenbaum”/”Aspen Tree” (H 9), “Nähe der Gräber”/”Nearness of Graves” (), “Corona” (H 29, J 44), “Tübingen, Jänner” (J 79)/”Tübingen, January” (H 155), “Psalm” (H 153, J 78)
• July 25 – Celan: “Engführung”/”The Straitening” (Hamburger)/”Stretto” (Joris) and “Szondi’s “Reading ‘Engführung’” (56 pp)
• August 1 – Celan’s The Meridian (13 pp) and Derrida’s “Majesties” (27 pp), “Language Is Never Owned” (11 pp)
• August 8 – break
• August 15 – Celan: “À la pointe acérée” (H 170), “Sprich auch du”/”Speak, You Also” (H 68)/”Speak, You Too” (J 54), “Mit Brief und Uhr”/”With Letter and Clock” (H 83), “The Syllable Pain” (J 91); and Derrida’s “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” I-III (30 pp)
• August 22 – Celan: “In eins”/”In One” (H 185), “Hinausgekrönt”/”Crowned Out” (H 187), “Es ist alles anders”/”Everything’s Different” (H 195), “Schibboleth”/”Shibboleth” (H 67, J 52), “Ashglory” (J 104), “Einmal”/”Once” (H 255), “Chymisch”/”Alchemical” (H 157, J 81), “Radix, Matrix” (H 165, J 83), “To One Who Stood at the Door” (J 86); and Derrida’s “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” IV-VII (34 pp)
• August 29 – Jabès’ Questions
• September 5 – Jabès’ Questions cont. and Derrida’s “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” (15 pp) and “Ellipsis” (7 pp)
• September 12 – break
• September 19 – Jabès’ Margins
• September 26 – Jabès’ Margins cont.

This module examines Jewish history and historiography as philosophical problems rather than as neutral records of the past. Moving from nineteenth-century rational reconstructions of Judaism to post-war critiques of historical reason, the seminar asks how Jewish thought has understood time, memory, catastrophe, and redemption—and how it has resisted the temptation to narrate its history as progress, continuity, or totality.

We begin with Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, where Jewish philosophy first presents itself as a rational, ethical tradition legible within modern historical consciousness. From there, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption decisively interrupts historicism, proposing revelation and redemption as modes of temporality irreducible to philosophical system or historical synthesis. Lev Shestov’s Athens and Jerusalem radicalizes this interruption by staging a revolt against necessity, reason, and philosophy of history itself, insisting on faith as an irreducibly non-historical act.

The seminar then turns to the crises of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” offers a messianic critique of historical materialism, while Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment confronts the collapse of Enlightenment narratives of progress in the shadow of catastrophe. Gershom Scholem’s writings on messianism and revelation provide a counter-history of Jewish temporality structured by rupture rather than development.

In the final sessions, Emmanuel Levinas and Amos Funkenstein bring the seminar into explicit dialogue with ethics and historiography. Levinas displaces historical meaning with ethical responsibility, while Funkenstein reflects directly on how Jewish history has been written, conceptualized, and contested. Together, these texts illuminate Jewish philosophy as an ongoing struggle over how—and whether—history itself can be thought.

Module IV: Identity – coming soon

• Halakhic Man – Joseph B. Soloveitchik
• God in Search of Man – Abraham Joshua Heschel
• The Non-Jewish Jew – Isaac Deutscher

This module examines modern Jewish identity through three sharply contrasting yet deeply interconnected visions of what it means to live, think, and belong as a Jew in the modern world. Rather than presuming a single model of belief or practice, the seminar stages Jewish identity as a field of tension among law, spirituality, and critique.

We begin with Joseph Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, which offers an internal, rigorously intellectual account of Jewish religious life grounded in halakhic normativity. For Soloveitchik, religious identity is not primarily a matter of belief or feeling, but of disciplined practice through which the world is structured, interpreted, and sanctified. Law becomes a creative and existential form, shaping subjectivity from within.

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God in Search of Man provides a powerful counterpoint. Where Soloveitchik emphasizes structure and commandment, Heschel foregrounds wonder, divine pathos, and human responsiveness. Religious identity here emerges not from mastery of law but from attentiveness to transcendence and ethical responsibility. Heschel challenges rationalism and legalism alike, insisting that faith is rooted in encounter, awe, and moral urgency.

The seminar concludes with Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew, which radically unsettles religious frameworks altogether. Deutscher articulates a secular, oppositional Jewish identity defined by ethical universalism, critique of tradition, and solidarity with the marginalized. His vision forces a reckoning with the limits of religious belonging and raises the question of whether Jewish identity can—or must—persist beyond theology and practice.

Together, these texts illuminate modern Jewish identity as an unresolved negotiation between obligation and freedom, faith and doubt, continuity and rupture.

The seminars will be conducted like (American) upper-division undergraduate and/or graduate philosophy courses: after a brief introduction, we will closely examine key passages from the texts and then discuss possible interpretation strategies. Participants should attend each meeting having already completed the reading assignment. No prior experience or education is required. And while the overall subject of these seminars is Modern Jewish Thought, participants certainly do not need to be Jewish or, because of my interdisciplinary pedagogy, even have much prior knowledge of, or much interest in, Judaism.

Schedule

Corresponding times around the world (beginning in March 2026, after the US goes on Daylight Savings Time):

Chicago 2:00 pm CDT UTC-5 hours
New York 3:00 pm EDT UTC-4 hours
San Francisco 12:00 noon PDT UTC-7 hours
London 7:00 pm GMT UTC
Paris 8:00 pm CET UTC+1 hour
Wellington 8:00 am NZDT UTC+13 hours
Sydney 6:00 am AEDT UTC+11 hours

Registration

Beginning July 18.