J.J. Kimche

J.J. Kimche is a founding faculty member of the University of Austin, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy. English by upbringing and an intellectual historian by training, he took his B.A. in Western philosophy and Jewish thought at Shalem College in Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

His work moves along the borderlands of European philosophy and Jewish thought: the Haskalah and its afterlives, the modern career of the Kabbalah, the commentators of the Hebrew Bible, and the historians who taught Judaism to think historically. His doctoral research recovered the life and works of Christian David Ginsburg, Victorian England’s greatest Hebraist and the subject of his next book.

He has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, MIT, Gratz College, and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and he writes for scholars and civilians alike: in the pages of First Things, the Wall Street Journal, and City Journal, and twice a month in his newsletter, The Jew From Nowhere. He works in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, German, and French.