Radical Jewish Thought

Is there a specifically Jewish radical tradition? How have experiences of diaspora, marginalization, and persecution fueled radical Jewish thought? In this seminar we will trace these questions across two centuries of writing, from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to Albert Memmi and Judith Butler. We will read primary texts closely, asking how Jewish thinkers came to reshape critical theory, phenomenology, deconstruction, and postcolonial and queer studies. Key animating concerns will be the universal and the particular, emancipation and liberation, and ethics and alterity. Students leave treating radical Jewish thought as a living resource for arguments about power, ethics, identity, and liberation.