• PhD, The Divinity School, University of Chicago  
• MSt, The Study of Jewish Christian Relations, The Divinity Faculty, The University of Cambridge
• MA, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, The University of Chicago

I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought with specializations in modern Jewish thought, ecocriticism, biblical hermeneutics, and Jewish-Christian relations. My research centers biblical interpretation as a mode of critical inquiry, foregrounds how the interpretation of scripture functions as political speech, and restores nineteenth-century figures to an archive of modern Jewish thought.

My first book, Emancipating Scripture: The Bible, Politics, and Modern Jewish Thought (Brown Judaic Studies, 2027) details how nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars harnessed the technical language of biblical scholarship to reconceptualize race, religion, history, and scripture and thereby imagine liberatory Jewish futures.

When racial antisemitism seeped from German biblical studies into nineteenth-century debates over Jewish emancipation, German Jewish scholars turned to Bible commentary as a political resource. Jewish scholars actively contributed to German biblical studies with their nearly two dozen commentaries, but the legacies of their Bible commentaries were erased by the Holocaust—and lost with them was the knowledge that self-definition and interreligious polemics lined the pages of Jewish Bible scholarship. Contested Scripture: The Bible, Politics, and Modern Jewish Thought traces how the three most influential nineteenth-century German Jewish Bible scholars, Salomon Herxheimer (1801-84), Ludwig Philippson (1811-89), and Heinrich Graetz (1817-91), crafted Bible commentaries free from Protestant figurations of Judaism and reconceptualized race, religion, history, and scripture to undermine the tropes most frequently cited to deny German Jewish emancipation. German Jewish scholars, like their Protestant contemporaries, harnessed the technical language of biblical scholarship to parlay scriptural interpretation into political possibility. At the heart of German thinking about Judaism sat biblical sacrifice, invoked as evidence that Jews were Oriental others, irreligious ritualists, antiquarian relics, or abiding witnesses to the truth of Jesus. In response, Herxheimer, Philippson, and Graetz reinterpreted biblical sacrifice to theorize an alternative racial hierarchy, a pluralist German religious culture, a non-evolutionary philosophy of history, and a de-Christianized discipline of biblical studies.

My second book, Ecocritical Modern Jewish Thought: Sacrifice, Decay, Trees, and Time, brings Jewish thought and scriptural hermeneutics together with ecocriticism and ecological philosophy.

Jewish poets and philosophers from Paul Celan to Steven Schwarzschild insist that Jews are an “unnatural” people, fundamentally alienated from the created world. And yet alienation does not capture how nature shows up in modern Jewish thought: Jewish scholars employ natural figures in myriad ways to stage philosophical, theological, and hermeneutical arguments. An ecocritical approach to Jewish thought attends to how thinkers appeal to nature—how they cite particular species or plant parts, ecological processes, or plant and animal relationships—as a mode of theorizing. Ecocritical Modern Jewish Thought: Sacrifice, Decay, Trees, and Time offers the first full-length ecocritical monograph of modern Jewish thinkers by reinterpreting the works of German and German-American Jewish scholars Ludwig Philippson, Hermann Cohen, Margarete Susman, and Susan Taubes through ecocritical theories of sacrifice, decomposition, trees, and time. This book crafts a more-than-human reinterpretation of sacrifice; considers decomposition as the prelude to renewal; maps the critique of nationalism posed by trees; and theorizes Jewish ecocritical temporality.  

I am also preparing Modern Jewish Thought: The Basics (Routledge), co-authored with Yaniv Feller.

Publications

“Tortured Readings: Jews, Muslims, and the Violence of Secular Scriptural Hermeneutics,” Political Theology 27.5 (Summer 2026): 748-67.

“Ludwig Philippson: Introduction to The Five Books of Moses,” Modern Jewish Theology: The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, ed. George Y. Kohler and Samuel J. Kessler (The Jewish Publication Society, 2023): 44-48

"Chastening Germany: Graetz’s Lusty Jew aAnd Asexual Jewess aAs Semitic Saviors" Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 43, Issue 143.1, (2023): 93–123.

“Heinrich Graetz and the Exegetical Contours of Modern Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 109.3 (Summer 2019): 360-383.

“Biblical Hermeneutics: Between Wissenschaft and Religion,” DAAT: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 88 (2019): 11-32.

 “Dismantling Orientalist Fantasies and Protestant Hegemony: German Jewish Exegetes and Their Retrieval of Josephus the Jew,” Josephus ins Modern Jewish Culture, ed. Andrea Schatz. (Brill, 2019): 218-239.

“Re-Forming Professions: Salomon Herxheimer and Ludwig Philippson on the Past and Present of Jewish Farmers.” Deutsch-jüdische Bibelwissenschaft – Historische, exegetische und theologische Perspektiven. Eds. Daniel Vorpahl, Shani Tzoref, and Sophia Kähler. (De Gruyter, 2019): 41-56.

• Julian Park Publication Fund Award, 2026
• Gender Institute Faculty Research Award, University at Buffalo, 2025
• UUP Individual Development Award, 2025
• Manuscript Review Workshop Grant, Office of International Education, University at Buffalo, 2024
• Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Award, 2023
• Faculty Fellow, Humanities Institute, University at Buffalo, Fall 2022
• Office of Inclusive Excellence Grant, University at Buffalo, 2021
• Gender Institute Faculty Research Award, University at Buffalo, 2021

Undergraduate
-JDS 103: Introduction to Judaism

-JDS 199: Violence and Religion

-JDS 295: Ecocriticism, Sustainability, and Jewish Environmental Ethics

-JDS 303:Money and Ethics

-JDS 313 : World Religions-JDS 240: Scripture and Interpretation

Graduate 

-JDS 595: Ecocritical Modern Jewish Thought