Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies & Medieval Studies
Michael Zank, a native of the Federal Republic of Germany, is Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies. He served as the director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies from 2013 – 2022. Zank completed his PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University in 1994, the same year he joined the Boston University faculty. In his most recent book, Jerusalem. A Brief History (2018), he tells the story of how an ordinary royal city of the ancient Southern Levant became the holy city of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In addition to teaching popular courses on the Bible and Jerusalem, he leads a seminar on Maimonides and his modern readers. For more on Professor Zank click here.
In Fall 2025, Michael Zank was appointed as director of the BU Institute for Philosophy and Religion. The directorship entails teaching a topics in philosophy and religion course and organizing concurrent public lectures.The topic for Fall ‘26 will be “Does Religion Need Philosophy? A Reading of Heidegger Reading Paul.”
Last year saw the publication of a Russian translation of Prof. Zank’s Jerusalem: Brief History (Иерусалим.Краткая история. Boston and St. Petersburg: Academic Studies Press, 2025).
He served as Division Chair for Medieval through Modern Thought, Theology, and Philosophy of the Association for Jewish Studies, reviewed grant proposals and manuscripts for.various national and international publishers and learned institutions, and presented a paper on Leo Strauss’s critique of Cohen’s Maimonides interpretation at a conference on “Hermann Cohen’s Ethics of Maimonides” at the University of Toronto.