Shaul Magid | Harvard University (original) (raw)
Shaul Magid is the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Before that he was the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Modern Judaism at Indiana University/Bloomington, the Elaine Ravitch Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaism at Rice University. His work spans the scope of Jewish thought, specializing in Kabbalah, Hasidism, Modern Jewish thought, American Jewish thought and culture, Zionism, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
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Scholarly Articles by Shaul Magid
Harvard Theological Review, 2024
This essay coins a term "Judeopessimism," engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing ... more This essay coins a term "Judeopessimism," engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing on antisemitism and its claim to be historical in nature through the lens of critical race theory, specifically Afropessimism and its offshoots, which make claims of anti-Blackness as political ontology. Is some of this writing on antisemitism really making theological or political ontological claims of "eternal antisemitism" refracted in a less volatile historical narrative? How can critical race theory and its understanding of anti-Blackness help refine, clarify, and push the discussion on antisemitism to be more forthright about its underlying claims? I explore some examples of ontological antisemitism in the writings of Meir Kahane and Naftali Zvi Berlin who each in different ways offer ahistorical and even ontological views on antisemitism that are mostly shunned by contemporary writing on the subject and suggest that Afropessimism offers a helpful way to see beyond the historical veil of how antisemitism is understood today.
Shaul Magid - "Is Israel Good for the American Diaspora?"
![Research paper thumbnail of Shaul Magid - "The Voice Is the Voice of the Right, but the Hands Are the Hands of the Left: On Meir Kahane", Reshit: Studies in Judaism 7 (2023), 166-177 [Hebrew]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/104617624/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Journal of Religious Ethics, 2022
In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Polit... more In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most American Jews and demonized by most Israeli Jews. Meir Kahane remains present because he never went away. And he never went away because he offered solutions that, while unpopular and egregious, continue to resonate when Jews begin to feel unstable about their place in America or Israel. He is the dark underside of the modern Jewish project that will not go away.
Anti-Semitism in Hungary, 2022
Harvard Theological Review, 2024
This essay coins a term "Judeopessimism," engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing ... more This essay coins a term "Judeopessimism," engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing on antisemitism and its claim to be historical in nature through the lens of critical race theory, specifically Afropessimism and its offshoots, which make claims of anti-Blackness as political ontology. Is some of this writing on antisemitism really making theological or political ontological claims of "eternal antisemitism" refracted in a less volatile historical narrative? How can critical race theory and its understanding of anti-Blackness help refine, clarify, and push the discussion on antisemitism to be more forthright about its underlying claims? I explore some examples of ontological antisemitism in the writings of Meir Kahane and Naftali Zvi Berlin who each in different ways offer ahistorical and even ontological views on antisemitism that are mostly shunned by contemporary writing on the subject and suggest that Afropessimism offers a helpful way to see beyond the historical veil of how antisemitism is understood today.
Shaul Magid - "Is Israel Good for the American Diaspora?"
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2022
In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Polit... more In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most American Jews and demonized by most Israeli Jews. Meir Kahane remains present because he never went away. And he never went away because he offered solutions that, while unpopular and egregious, continue to resonate when Jews begin to feel unstable about their place in America or Israel. He is the dark underside of the modern Jewish project that will not go away.
Anti-Semitism in Hungary, 2022
Religion Dispatches, 2024
Dedicated to Fred Moten, inspiration and friend. fter listening to a 90-minute comprehensive webi... more Dedicated to Fred Moten, inspiration and friend. fter listening to a 90-minute comprehensive webinar on campus protests and antisemitism, led by a prominent Hillel rabbi at an elite university, I was shocked that there was no mention of Israel's war on Gaza that has so
the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew.... more the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew. And I am alive. As a scholar of Judaism I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about, and teaching about dead Jews. So I guess I love dead Jews. But I'm not the "people" Dara Horn is referring to in her new book
the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew.... more the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew. And I am alive. As a scholar of Judaism I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about, and teaching about dead Jews. So I guess I love dead Jews. But I'm not the "people" Dara Horn is referring to in her new book
the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew.... more the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew. And I am alive. As a scholar of Judaism I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about, and teaching about dead Jews. So I guess I love dead Jews. But I'm not the "people" Dara Horn is referring to in her new book
the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew.... more the-haterade jews/&text=Savoring%20the%20Haterade%3A%20Why%20Jews%20Love%20Dara%20Horn% am a Jew. And I am alive. As a scholar of Judaism I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about, and teaching about dead Jews. So I guess I love dead Jews. But I'm not the "people" Dara Horn is referring to in her new book
Tablet Magazine, 2020
Zionist scholars are battling the religious left for the Hasidic legacy By Shaul Magid Today we a... more Zionist scholars are battling the religious left for the Hasidic legacy By Shaul Magid Today we are in the midst of an internal battle in the academic study of Hasidism, an attempt by more conservative readers to appropriate Hasidism, particularly as seen from the viewpoint of the academy, from its more radical neo-Hasidic frame. Neo-Hasidism has historically been congenial to left-wing and revolutionary religious readings. Its conservative critics, whom we might call neo-Haredim, comprise a loose group of scholars, mostly within the Orthodox world, who have been engaging in a synthetic project merging Hasidism with the Zionist writings of Abraham Kook (1865-1935) and with various other forms of a new nationalized Jewish spirituality. My intention in this essay is not to delve into the arguments and counterarguments of each side, nor to weigh in on which view is more compelling. Rather, I explore how and why this is happening when it is. What prompted this scholarly backlash, this challenge to the neo-Hasidic frame of Hasidic scholarship? First, the background. There were at least two waves of neo-Hasidism, movements that have appropriated and transformed what they loved most in the original 18th-century Hasidism for their own creative and religious purposes. The first wave comprised literary figures, artists, and theologians in the early 20th century. The second wave emerged in 1960s and 1970s counterculture, using Hasidism as a Jewish source for nontraditional religiosity that cohered with the revolutionary spirit of the age. In both of these waves, neo-Hasidism was interested in Hasidism's radical, critical perspective of normative religious practice. And this was true not only for practitioners, but also for scholars who used neo-Hasidism as a scholarly frame, concerned more with explication than with praxis. Frequently, of course, there was overlap between neo
