Sam S.B. Shonkoff
Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies
Sam Shonkoff (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is the Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the GTU, where he teaches on Jewish religious thought as well as methods in the study of religion. His scholarship focuses primarily on German-Jewish and Hasidic theologies, as well as appropriations of Hasidic spirituality in relatively secular spheres. Shonkoff is co-editor with Ariel Evan Mayse of Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community and Life in the Modern World (Brandeis University Press, 2020) and the editor of Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy (Brill, 2018). His current book project investigates themes of embodiment in Buber’s representations of Hasidism vis-à-vis the original sources. To view Shonkoff's publications and an extended CV, please visit https://gtu.academia.edu/SamShonkoff.
PhD, with distinction, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2018
MA, University of Toronto, 2011
BA, magna cum laude, Brown University, 2007
German-Jewish thought
Hasidism and Neo-Hasidism
Philosophy of religion
Jewish hermeneutics
Formulations of dynamics between corporeality and spirituality
Psychedelics and religion
BOOKS
- Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and Life in the Modern World, ed. with Ariel Evan Mayse (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2020).
- Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
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“Child Mind in Hasidic Spirituality,” in Jewish Culture and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Michael Fishbane on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Eitan Fishbane and Elisha Russ-Fishbane (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023), 233–248.
- “Gender in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 68.1 (2023): 91–107.
- “‘The Bodily Fact of Otherness’: Martin Buber’s Post-Kantian Phenomenology of Dialogue,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 30.2 (2022): 301–336.
- “‘We Shall Do and We Shall Understand’: Embodied Theology in Modern Judaism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, ed. Yudit Greenberg and George Pati (New York: Routledge, 2023), 86–103.
- “Neo-Hasidism,” Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, ed. Naomi Seidman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
- “From Secular Religiosity to Cultural Disjunctions: Visions of Post-Traditional Jewishness in the Thought of Paul Mendes-Flohr,” Religions 13.2 (2022): 127.
- “‘Corporeality, Not Spirituality’: Martin Buber’s Resistance at Eranos in 1934,” The Journal of Religion 101.4 (2021): 505–523.
- “What the Study of Religion Can Teach Us about Psychedelics,” Bill of Health (Harvard Law School, 2020).
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“Martin Buber,” in A New Hasidism: Roots, ed. Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society and University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 51–64.
- “Metanomianism and Religious Praxis in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales,” Religions 9.12 (special issue on Religion and Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr, 2018).
- “Michael Fishbane: An Intellectual Portrait," in Michael Fishbane: Jewish Hermeneutical Theology, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1-52.
- “Temples on Fire: Desert, Dust, and Destruction,” in Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man, ed. Samantha Krukowski (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2014), 176-183.
- “The Two Tablets: On Dissolving Ethical-Theological Dualism in Sacred Attunement,” The Journal of Religion 93.4 (2013): 434-451.
Modern Judaisms: Religion, Culture, or Nationality?
Hasidic Mysticism
Introduction to Jewish Theology
Jewish Counterculture of the Sixties
Theology and Ethics departmental seminar