Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism

This talk will give an overview of Jonathan Judaken’s new book, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024). The book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia.

Jonathan Judaken is the Gloria M. Goldstein Chair of Jewish History and Thought and Chair of the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of some fifty academic articles on the history of existentialism, anti-Semitism, racism, critical theory, and on post-Holocaust French Jewish thought. He has written, edited, or coedited seven books, including Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (2006), Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context (2012) and The Albert Memmi Reader (2020).

He has visited both Israel and South Africa as a Fulbright Senior Specialist (2011 and 2013) and he was previously a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2006–7). He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard (2000) and at the College of Charleston (2019).

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