Martin Kavka

Dr. Kavka’s publications over the last fifteen years have treated how Jews in the modern West have appropriated, and resisted appropriating, various ideas and arguments in the canon of modern Western philosophy, in the service of two interests that do not always mesh well with one another: articulating Jews’ commonality with Western culture, and articulating their difference from Western culture. His first book, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), received the inaugural Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought from the Association of Jewish Studies in 2008, awarded to outstanding scholarship in that subfield published between 2004 and 2008. The forthcoming Perils of Covenant, comprised of several essays published over the last decade, is an argument that the so-called “covenant theology” that became popular in American Jewish thought after World War II is politically obsolete these days, when Jews’ and Americans’ “enemies” are no longer godless communists but other religionists, and is philosophically powerless to deal with the suffering and evil that occurs in history.