Jewish Legal Theories

Leora Batnitzky joined the faculty in 1997. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. In 2002 she received Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). She is currently working on two books, the first a comparative study of conversion controversies in Israel and India, tentatively titled What is Religious Freedom? The Case of Conversion in Israel and India, and the second on the Jewish apostate and Catholic saint Edith Stein, tentatively titled The Continued Relevance of Edith Stein for Jewish and Christian Self-Understanding.

She is co-editor, with Ilana Pardes, of The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (de Gruyter, 2014), with Hanoch Dagan, of Institutionalizing Rights and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2017), with Yonatan Brafman, of an anthology Jewish Legal Theories (Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, 2018) and, with Ra’anan Boustan, of the journal Jewish Studies Quarterly. Along with Vivian Liska and Ilana Pardes, she is co-director of the international Center for Bible, Culture, and Modernity, https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/bible-culture-modernity/(link is external). She served as Chair of the Department of Religion from 2010-2019. She served as Chair of the Department of Religion from 2010-2019 and currently serves as Director of Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies.

Yonatan Y. Brafman is assistant professor of modern Judaism in the Department of Religion and a member of the Program in Judaic Studies at Tufts University. His research focuses on the intersection of Jewish thought, Jewish law, and contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy. At the Katz Center, he will examine the systematicity of Jewish law in the modern period.

Brafman received his PhD in the philosophy of religion and Jewish thought from Columbia University. He has taught in the Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University, the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.