Philip Podolsky

I am writing my PhD in the Department of Comparative Religion under Dr. Karma Ben Johanan on "Michel Foucault and the Jewish Question." I wrote my MA thesis on Foucault's response to an outbreak of antisemitic violence he witnessed in Tunisia during the 1967 Six-Day War. My PhD thesis, which has grown out of that work, sets out to explore the following hypothesis: the aspect of the great French thinker's work that can be brought to bear most fruitfully on the topic controversially designated in French intellectual history as the Jewish Question is the genealogy of the Christian self found in the later volumes of his History of Sexuality. More broadly yet, I intend to explore the Foucault who in 1979 proclaimed the "return of religion," and to suggest that thinking through the connections between his political interventions and his studies of early Christianity could open conceptual vistas into the ways in which religion and theology shape politics in our own time.  

My BA in English and MA in Romance Studies are from the Hebrew University. In addition to my scholarly pursuits, I am a news editor with a passion for Middle East politics.