Professor Sarah Hammerschlag delivered this year's Albert and Vera List Jewish Studies Lecture on the topic "Truth for Children: Suffering and Election in Postwar French Jewish Thought."
In her lecture Hammerschlag considers the role of biblical interpretation among a range of French Jewish intellectuals during WWII and the role it played as a means of framing the experience of Jewish suffering. She considers how these interpretations then inflected the political self-understanding of these figures in the late 1950s and 1960s as they began to gather to redefine the nature of the Jewish Intellectual in France at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française.
Sarah Hammerschlag is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics.
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