
The Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies Director of Graduate Studies, Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program My teaching focuses primarily on Kabbala, Hasidism, religious fundamentalism, Israel/Palestine, and modern and American Jewish thought and culture. Areas of interest and research include sixteenth century Kabbala, Hasidism, American Judaism, comparative religion, and contemporary conceptions of Jewish religiosity. I am the editor of God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Essays on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (SUNY Press, 2001), co-editor of Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutic of Jewish Texts (Seven Bridges Press, 2002) and author of Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008) which was awarded the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best book in religion in the textual studies category, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). I am the series editor for “Post-Rabbinic Judaisms” for Academic Studies Press. I am also a regular contributor to Tikkun Magazine, Zeek Magazine, Open Zion, and Religion Dispatches.
Books

American Post-Judaism
Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society
2013

Hasidism Incarnate
Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism
2014

Torah in a Time of Plague
Historical and Contemporary Jewish Responses
2021

Meir Kahane
The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical
2021

The Necessity of Exile
Essays from a Distance
2023