Meet the Faculty

Shaul Magid

• Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• The Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Chair, Jewish Studies in Modern Judaism

Education

• Ph.D. at Brandeis University, 1994

Contact Information

Background

My teaching focuses primarily on Kabbala, Hasidism, Judaism and gender, Israel/Palestine, and American Jewish thought and culture. Areas of interest and research include sixteenth century Kabbala, Hasidism, American Judaism, and contemporary conceptions of Jewish religiosity. I am the editor of God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Essays on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (SUNY Press, 2001), co-editor of Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutic of Jewish Texts (Seven Bridges Press, 2002) and author of Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). My latest book From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008) was awarded the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best book in religion in the textual studies category. I am co-chair of the steering committee for the Study of Judaism for the “American Academy of Religion” and director of the Jewish Mysticism section for the “Association of Jewish Studies.” I am also the series editor for “Post-Rabbinic Judaisms” for Academic Studies Press. My forthcoming book, Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in Post Ethnic America: Ethnicity, Renewal, and Becoming an American Religion, which will be published by Indiana University Press. I am presently completing another book entitled Hasidism Incarnate: Divine Embodiment and Redemption in Hasidic Literature. I am also a regular contributor to Tikkun Magazine, Zeek Magazine, Religion Dispatches, and Occasional Religion.

For links to numerous topical and scholarly articles and essays please visit my blog "Radical Banjo" available at www.shaulmagid.net.

Research Interests

• Kabbala
• Medieval and modern Jewish philosophy
• Hasidism
• Gender and religion
• Jewish ethics and contemporary Jewish religiosity
• Renewal and fundamentalism

Courses Recently Taught

• Introduction to Judaism
• Contemporary Issues in Judaism
• Religions of the West
• Hasidism & Existentialism

Publication Highlights

Articles

"The Politics of (un) Conversion: The 'Mixed Multitude' (erev rav) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital's Etz Ha-Da'at Tov, Jewish Quarterly Review (2005)

"Rainbow Hasidism in America—The Maturation of Jewish Renewal—A Review Essay," The Reconstructionist (Spring, 2004): 34-60

"Is Egalitarianism Heresy: Re-Thinking Gender on the Margins of Judaism" Nashim 8 (Fall, 2004); "Judaism and Reconciliation" Concilium: Reconciliation in a World of Conflicts, 2003-5 (forthcoming)

"Lurianic Kabbala and Original Sin," [Hebrew] Hafatzat Ha-Kabbalah (The Influence of Kabbala), Moseh Idel ed. Jerusalem, 2005

"Ethics Disentangled from the Law: Hasidism and Dispositional Ethics," A Companion to Religious Ethics, Charley Hallisey, William Schweiker eds., (Blackwell Press: England, 2004)