Gil Anidjar

Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Departments of Religion, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and is affiliated faculty at the Center for Palestine Studies, at Columbia University. He has been a visiting professor at several universities worldwide. Trained in Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, and Jewish Thought, his intellectual interests include Jews and Arabs, Political Theology, Race and Religion, Christianity, Rhetorical Exertion, Continental Philosophy. Anidjar's work engages urgent political issues of the present, including secularism, its limits and possibilities; the conflation of religious, ethnic and racial categories; the place of Europe in locating the enmity between Jew and Arab; the figure of the Muslim in Auschwitz; and the problem of universalism, and Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law, thereby opening the space for a more illuminating and critical evaluation of our present historical moment. Anidjar holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include: Our Place in al-Andalus’: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003); Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (2008); Blood: a Critique of Christianity (2014). He is the editor of a collection of essays originally written by Jacques Derrida, entitled, Acts of Religion (2002).