I am an intellectual historian of modern Jewish thought. My work explores intersections between kabbalah and philosophy, with a focus on Jewish thinkers in twentieth century France. I am interested in questions of conceptual translation, interpretation, and counter secularization.

I received my PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago in August 2021. My dissertation examined the postwar thought of Jacob Gordin (1896-1947), a Russian-Jewish Neo-Kantian philosopher, and Gordin’s chief disciple, Léon Askenazi (1922-1996), a North-African kabbalist and prominent spiritual leader of Francophone Jewry in the second half of the twentieth century.

At the Polonsky Academy, I am working on a project that rethinks the contours of Jewish philosophy in Europe, through an interrogation of the thought and reception of two early modern figures: Rabbi Judah Loew (c. 1520-1609), known under his acronym, the Maharal, and philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). The first part of this project examines Maharal and Spinoza’s Jewish receptions in postwar France as a case study of their wider co-presence in twentieth century Jewish thought. The second part reconstructs a philosophical dialogue between Maharal and Spinoza, focusing on central elements in their metaphysics, hermeneutics, and political theory.

Prior to Polonsky, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Philosophy at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto (2021-2023). I also held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020-2021.