Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Forum for Jewish-Muslim Theology and Thought

 

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Elisabeth Becker-Topkara is an Assistant Professor/Freigeist Fellow at the Max-Weber-Institute-for- Sociology, Heidelberg University. Elisabeth’s research centers on the cultural construction and contestation of borders and boundaries. She explores the experiences and place-making practices of religious, racial, and ethnic minorities – Muslims and Jews in particular – in both Europe and the United States. Elisabeth has contributed to sociological debates on how migration and pluralism shape contemporary societies. Her book, Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention (University of Chicago Press),offers a unique look into two of Europe’s largest urban mosque communities, providing a complex picture of Muslim life, while highlighting the failures of European pluralism.

 

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Shira Billet is assistant professor of Jewish thought and ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Shira completed her PhD in Religion at Princeton University with a dissertation entitled "The Philosopher as Witness: Hermann Cohen's Philosophers and the Trials of Wissenschaft des Judentums." Before joining the faculty at JTS, Shira was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in Judaic Studies and Philosophy. She is currently completing her first book on the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen.

 

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Yaniv Feller is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. His book, The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

 

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Zvi Gilboa is an Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew, AGFM at the University of Virginia. His research lies in the fields of Transnational Studies, German Literature and Culture, Transnational Literature in Hebrew, and Language Pedagogy, the latter with special emphasis on cultural and literary authorship by non-native speakers. In the College of Arts and Sciences, Zvi teaches a seminar on migration, refuge, and asylum, where participants engage with contemporary societal transformations of Europe and the Middle East. With a dual focus on fiction and essayistic discourse, Zvi's current book project pursues the idea of transnational writing as attempted historical intervention.

 

 

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After training in medieval history at the University of Lyon, Samia Hathroubi began her professional career as a history teacher in France. She joined the non-profit sector in 2011 by working in the Middle-East around the issues of reconciliation, democracy and human rights. After a career as a program and advocacy director for European and French movements around inter-religious dialogue, notably Judeo-Muslim, Samia resumed her studies in sociology at the University of Strasbourg during which she studied the engagement of Muslims in inter-religious spheres.

She is currently a doctoral student with Dr. Elisabeth Becker at the Freigeist Project at the University of Heidelberg.

She studies the political discourses around Jews and Muslims in France and Germany and their impact on movements in Paris and Berlin.

 

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Celene Ibrahim is the author of Women and Gender in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Islam and Monotheism in the Cambridge University Press Elements series (2022). She is a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Groton School where she teaches global religious history and applied ethics. Ibrahim holds a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Civilizations and a master's degree in Women's and Gender Studies and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, a Masters of Divinity from Harvard University, and a bachelor's degree with highest honors from Princeton University.

 

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George Y. Kohler is associate professor for modern Jewish philosophy and director of the Joseph Carlebach Institute at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. His research focuses on Jewish thought from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen, with a special interest in the Wissenschaft des Judentums – movement and its writing of modern Jewish theology. He has published on the reception of Maimonides in modern Jewish thought and on liberal theories of Jewish Messianism. His most recent book rediscovered the achievements of the Wissenschaft-scholars in the research of Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah. He is currently working on a volume called “Modern Jewish Theology (1830-1930)” a collection of central German-Jewish theological texts, translated for the first time into English.

 

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Jack Kugelmass is Professor of Anthropology and the Melton Legislative Professor at the University of Florida and past director of the Center for Jewish Studies. B.A. McGill University, M.A. and Ph.D. New School for Social Research. He was previously Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Folklore Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Professor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program and the Director and Lowe Professor of Holocaust and Modern Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lady Davis Foundation at the Hebrew University, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Research at the University of Pennsylvania and the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan. His publications include Between  Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry (ed), Going Home: How  American  Jews  Invent the Old Country (ed), Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (ed), Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship (ed), co-author of Let There Be Laughter, author of Masked Culture: The Village Halloween Parade, The Miracle of Intervale Avenue and co-author of From A Ruined Garden. Most recent: Sifting the Ruins: Émigré Jewish Journalists’ Return Visits to the Old Country, 1946-1948, “Strange Encounters: Expat and Refugee Polish-Jewish Journalists in Poland and Germany Shortly after World War II” and his most recent essays are: “Rayze,”  “Blinded by their Zeal,” “Nothing Is Forever,” and “Between the Wild and the Civilized.”

 

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Tugrul Kurt studied International Islamic Theology at Marmara University in Istanbul and completed his MA in History of Religions and Religious Studies. Since 2018 he has been doing his doctorate at the Goethe University in the field of Islamic Studies, in the field of Quranic exegesis. From 2018-2021 he was a member of the DFG graduate college "Theology as Science". Since February 2021 he has been a research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin and co-coordinator of the AIWG project "Linked Open Tafsir".

 

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Elad Lapidot is Professor for Hebraic Studies at the University of Lille, France. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Univeristät in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).

 

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Sara Omar received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. Her work traces the legal and social genealogies governing words, concepts, and the practices that they encode. Much of her research explores the logic, contexts, and hierarchies that have shaped discourses of normativity over the first eight centuries of Islamic history, particularly as they relate to gendered patterns of power. Her research and teaching interests include: Islamic intellectual history, the Qur’ān and its exegesis, Islamic Law, gender and sexuality, religious authority, and religion and violence.

 

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Armina Omerika is Professor of Intellectual History of Islam at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She obtained her PhD in Islamic Studies (2009) at the University Bochum with a thesis on the history of Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th Century. Since 2005, she has worked in the field of History of Islam and in Islamic Studies at universities in Germany, the USA and Switzerland and had visiting professorships in Islamic Studies at the Universities of Hamburg (2014) and Zurich (2017). Her fields of interest include Islam in Southeastern Europe, the modern intellectual history of Islam, current developments in transnational Islamic religious thought, Islam and digital transformations, as well as the history of European scholarship on Islam.

 

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Ephraim Meir is Professor emeritus of modern Jewish Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. From 2009 until 2017, he was the Levinas guest Professor for Jewish Dialogue Studies and Interreligious Theology at the Academy of World Religions, University of Hamburg. In 2018 he was research fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. In 2021 and 2022 he was a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa. He is President of the International Rosenzweig Society. ​
Among his recent works are Dialogical Thought and Identity (2013), Interreligious Theology. Its Value and Mooring in modern Jewish Philosophy (2015), Becoming Interreligious (2017), Old-New Jewish Humanism (2018), and Faith in the Plural (2019). His latest monograph is entitled The Marvel of Relatedness (2021).

 

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Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020).

 

Ogunnaike received his Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Religion from Harvard University. Prior to his appointment at UVA, he taught at the College of William and Mary and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Professor Ogunnaike also works on the Philosophy of Religion, African Philosophy, and Decolonial theory.

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Elias Sacks is Director of the Program in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his areas of research include Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian relations, philosophy of religion, religion and politics, hermeneutics, and religious ethics. He has published on medieval and modern thinkers such as Maimonides, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Nachman Krochmal, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jacob Taubes, including the 2017 book Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script (Indiana University Press) and some of the first English translations of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings. In January 2023, he will become the Director of the Jewish Publication Society.

 

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Nimet Şeker studied Islamic Studies, German and Ethnology at the University of Cologne. After graduating, she initially worked as an editor and journalist for national media. She completed her doctorate with a focus on Qur’anic exegesis and Qur’anic studies in 2017 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. As a PostDoc she had several guest lectureships in Switzerland and substitute professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, among others. She then habilitated at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in the subject of Islamic Studies. In March 2022 she was appointed Professor of Islamic Textual Studies (Qur’an and Hadith) at the Humboldt University.

 

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Cedric Cohen Skalli teaches early modern and modern Jewish Philosophy at the University of Haifa. He is the director of the Bucerius Institute for the research of contemporary German History and Society. His research focuses on the relationship of Jewish thinkers to two main philosophical shifts: the shift from Medieval philosophy to early modern thought (14th-17thcentury), and the shift from early modern to modern thought (18th-20thcentury). He published several books and many articles on diverse aspects of Jewish thought and literature in the Renaissance as well as in 19th and 20th century German speaking world and diasporas. His intellectual biography of Isaac Abravanel was published in the prestigious “the great men of the Jewish people” series of the Zalman Shazar Center and recently translated and augmented for The Tauber Institute Series For Study of European Jewry (Brandeis University Press). He is also translator of many works of Freud, Benjamin, Scholem, Idel and Abravanel and head of the new Project: “The Revival of Philosophy in the 19th-Century and Early 20th-Century Middle East: An Untold Story.”

 

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Daniel H. Weiss is Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He is author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion (2012) and Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence (forthcoming 2023), among other publications, and co-editor of multiple books, including Scripture and Violence (2020). Actively involved in the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, he is a recent recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

 

 

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