Professor Jonathan Judaken

Professional Background

Professor Jonathan Judaken received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in history from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was Associate Professor of History at the University of Memphis. For his Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship, Professor Judaken conducted research for his project “Theorizing Antisemitism: Confronting Modernity and Modern Judeophobia.”

Professor Judaken is the author of the book Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), and numerous articles including, “Intellectuals, Culture and the Vichy Years: Re-appraisals and New Perspectives,” Contemporary French Civilization, Denis Provencher and Andrew Sabonet, eds. special issue France, 1940-1944: The Ambiguous Legacy (Fall 2007, forthcoming); “Alain Finkielkraut and the Nouveaux Philosophes: French-Jewish Intellectuals, the Afterlives of May ’68 and the Re-birth of the National Icon,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, vol. 32, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 193-223;
“Sartre, Israël et la politique de l’intellectuel,” in La Règle du jeu, n. 27 (January 2005): 152-165; reprinted in Sartre et les juifs, ed. by Ingrid Galster (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, May 2005): 211-221; “‘To be or not to be French’”: Soixante-huitard Reflections on ‘la question juive,’” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (MJS), vol. 1, no. 1 (April 2002): 3-21; and “Bearing Witness to the Différend: Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Intellectual and ‘the Jews,’” Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, v. 16, Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 245-264. Professor Judaken has lectured widely about his work and is the recipient of several prestigious fellowships and honors, including a post-doctoral fellowship in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an invitation to participate in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on the Holocaust and Antisemitism in France at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Center, Professor Judaken conducted a comparative study on theorists of antisemitism whose interest is to understand the constitutive elements of modern Jew hatred in order to ground their opposition to it on the structural levels where they construe its root cause. In doing so he explored the underlying arguments of scholarly debate on racism and how these theories define modern day approaches to understanding antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Professor Judaken also developed a reader that addresses the ways antisemitism has accommodated to changing circumstances from its origins to the present.

Professor Judaken was in residence at the Mandel Center from September 1, 2006 to April 30, 2007.