Jonathan Judaken

Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College in Memphis. He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine in 1997, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on how representations of Jews and Judaism and Blacks and racism serve as insightful prisms through which to re-evaluate questions about modernity and religion, tolerance and intolerance, and identity both collective and individual. He has published widely on French intellectuals and the Jewish Question and French-Jewish philosophers, including his monograph _Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual_ (University of Nebraska Press, “Texts and Contexts,” 2006). He is the editor of _Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism_ (SUNY Press, “Race and Philosophy,” 2008) and _Naming Race, Naming Racisms_ (Routledge, 2009). His most recent book, _Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context_ (Columbia University Press, May 2012) was co-edited with Robert Bernasconi. He has long been working on a monograph entitled, _Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism: Post-Holocaust Reflections on Modernity and Modern Judeophobia_, which is a history of major theories and theorists of anti-Semitism. He recently visited both Israel and South Africa as a Fulbright Senior Specialist (Summer 2011 and Summer 2013). He was previously a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2006-2007). He has also been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard (2000). He is U.S. Contributing Editor for the journal _Patterns of Prejudice_ and on the Associate Editorial Board for the journal _Critical Philosophy of Race_. Judaken hosts a radio show that airs monthly on NPR’s WKNO-FM entitled, “Counterpoint,” which sheds light on the relevance of academic and intellectual discussions for broader public debates.