The Religion & Culture Web Forum
March 2008
Contributor Biographies
The Last Prophet: Spinoza and the Political Theology of Moses Hess
Jerome E. Copulsky is Assistant Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at Goucher College. He was previously Assistant Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech, and holds degrees from Wesleyan, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. His essays, stories and reviews have appeared such places as The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon.com, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Azure and Zeek.
Rabbi Shai Held teaches both Jewish Theology and Jewish Law at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is also Scholar-in-Residence at Congregation Hadar in New York City and Co-Founder of Mechon Hadar: An Institute for Prayer, Personal Growth, and Jewish Study (www.mechonhadar.org). A renowned lecturer and educator, Rabbi Held’s academic expertise is in the history of Zionism and in the intersections of modern Jewish and Christian thought. He was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and is currently completing his doctorate in religious studies at Harvard.
Jeff Israel is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he also received an M.A. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem and Cincinnati.
Jeff’s dissertation is entitled, “Jewish Humor and Political Civility: On Moral Play with Tradition, Self, and Others.” His scholarly interests include: religion and political philosophy, the ethical and political significance of “play,” modern Jewish political philosophy, and the problems faced by minority identities in modern nation-states. Jeff has taught courses on religion and politics at the Northwestern University School of Continuing Studies and on political philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also worked over the past few years as a Program Associate at the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, based in Chicago. Jeff is currently a Junior Fellow at the Martin Marty Center.
Ben Sax is a Ph.D. candidate at the Divinity School completing a dissertation on Franz Rosenzweig’s hermeneutic of citation. He holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an M.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was also a visiting fellow in 2005-6. Sax has worked at the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center in Jerusalem and has taught Modern Judaism at DePaul University (Chicago). In autumn 2008, he will be an associate lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, teaching Jewish and Holocaust history.
Sax’s research is broadly focused on the predicament of the Jew in the modern world and more specifically on how modern German-Jewish thinkers in the early twentieth century grappled with the dialectical tension between religious tradition, language, and secularity. He has received numerous fellowships in support of his research, which he has presented internationally.
The Religion and Culture Web Forum comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Persons seeking to copy or use this material must obtain permission from the Divinity School. 1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. (773) 702-8230.
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