Panel Discussion

Critical Theory, Jewishness, and Antisemitism

Thu, Apr 11, 2024

1:30 PM–7:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)

More information and zoom registration can be found here.

Introductory Remarks
1:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Critical Theorists, Judaism, and Jewishness
2:00 p.m. – 3:40 p.m.

Chair: Richard Wolin (CUNY Graduate Center)

Coffee Break
3:40 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Critical Theory and Antisemitism
4:00 p.m. – 5:40 p.m.

Respondent: Seyla Benhabib (Columbia University)

Chair: Susan Buck-Morss (CUNY Graduate Center)

Coffee Break
5:40 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Keynote Address
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Chair: Jack Jacobs (John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center)

More information and zoom registration can be found here.

PARTICIPANTS

Asaf Angermann is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish thought at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He is the author ofDamaged Irony: Kierkegaard, Adorno, and the Negative Dialectics of Critical Subjectivity (2014); the editor of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem: Correspondence 1939-1969 (2015, 2021); and the translator (from German to Hebrew) of Adorno’s Education to Maturity and Responsibility (2017). His current work focuses on critical theory of race, gender, and sexuality, and on Black-Jewish relations.

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Her books include: Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History form Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin ( 2018); Gleichheit und Differenz. Die Würde des Menschen und die Souveränitätsansprüche der Vőlker/Equality and Difference. Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty ( 2013); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (2011); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations (2006); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (Cambridge, 2004): The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002).

Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. His work centers on the communal dynamics and collective identities of East European and Ashkenazi-derived communities in the modern period. His most recent monograph is Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (2020). He is also a Yiddish translator and, together with Jonah Sampson Boyarin, has produced the forthcoming As the Story Goes (Ben Yehuda Press), a collection of anecdotes about notable Jewish figures.

Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Theory at CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a core member of the interdisciplinary research group, Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is Jan Rock Zubrow Professor of Government Emerita at Cornell University. Her most recent books are Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021), Revolution Today (2019), and (with Adam Michaels and Kevin McCaughey), Seeing, Making Room for Thought (2023). Previous books include Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (1977, 2002).

Jack Jacobs is Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Acting Executive Officer of the Graduate Center’s Political Science Program. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015). He is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at100 (2001) and of Jews and Leftist Politics (2017). Professor Jacobs has served as a Fulbright Scholar at both Tel Aviv University and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, as the Louis and Helen Padnos Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, as the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar at the YIVO Institute, and as a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (1973 and 1996); Marxism and Totality (1984); Adorno (1984); Permanent Exiles (1985); Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (1989); Force Fields (1993); Downcast Eyes (1993); Cultural Semantics (1998); Refractions of Violence (2003); La Crisis de la experiencia en la era postsubjetiva, ed. Eduardo Sabrovsky (2003 (2004 (2010), Essays from the Edge (2011); Kracauer l’exilé (2014); Reason After its Eclipse (2016); Splinters in Your Eye(2020); Trois études sur Adorno (2021); Genesis and Validity (2021); Utopia y Dialéctica (2023) and Immanent Critiques (2023). His research interests are in modern European Intellectual History, Critical Theory and Visual Culture.

Jonathan Judaken is the Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published more than 50 academic articles on the history of existentialism, anti-Semitism, racism, and post-Holocaust French Jewish thought. He has written, edited, or co-edited 7 books. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (2006); editor of Race After Sartre (2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (2009) and co-editor of Situating Existentialism (2012), Memphis: 200 Years Together (2019), and most recently The Albert Memmi Reader (2020). Recent publications also include introductions to a co-edited special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018) and the roundtable he edited in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018). His most recent monograph is Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (2024), and he is completing Judeophobia and Anti-Semitism: A Primary Source Reader from its Origins to the Present (Palgrave).

Lars Rensmann, Ph.D., is Professor of Political Science and Comparative Government at the University of Passau, Germany. From 2016 to 2022, he was Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he also served as Founding Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics. Prior to this, he taught at various universities around the world, including John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, the University of Michigan, the University of Vienna, and the Freie Universität Berlin. His books include Global Politics after Arendt (forthcoming); The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (2017), Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Reflections (, 2012, co-edited with Samir Gandesha), Authoritarianism and Democracy (2011, with Hajo Funke & Steffen Hagemann), and Gaming the World (2010, with Andrei S. Markovits).

Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Brown Distinguished Professor in Arts and Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She held Visiting Professorships at numerous universities in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Among her awards are the American Guggenheim Fellowship, the German Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and an honorary degree from the University of Graz. Among her recent book publications are: Nachträglich, grundlegend: Der Kommentar als Denkform in der jüdischen Moderne von Hermann Cohen bis Jacques Derrida (with Andreas Kilcher; 2018); Benjamin Veitel Ephraim: Kaufmann, Schriftsteller, Geheimagent (2021) und Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family (2021). She is currently curating an international exhibition entitled “What is Enlightenment? Questions for the Eighteenth Century” for the German Historical Museum in Berlin, to open in October 2024.

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History, Political Science and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught at the University of Paris, the University of Copenhagen, and Beijing University and writes frequently on intellectual and political themes for the New Republic, the Nation, and Dissent. Among his books are Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse (2015); The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (2019); and Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (2023).

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