Michael Zank

Michael Zank (b. 1958) studied in Göttingen, Kiel, Heidelberg, and Jerusalem before he entered the PhD program in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. A member of the BU Religion Department since 1994, Zank teaches introductory classes on the Bible and the afterlife of biblical traditions (including “Holy City: Jerusalem in Time, Space, and the Imagination”) and advanced courses in philosophy of religion and Jewish thought (including “Maimonides”). 

Zank’s research on Bible and biblical reception, German-Jewish history, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion, Jewish thought, political Hebraism, political philosophy, and other subjects is driven by the tensions in his cultural background as a migrant between German culture and Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world for whom philosophy and the symbolic worlds of religious literature provide key “texts” for our personal and collective struggles for orientation. Zank is grateful to have landed in a Religion department hospitable to his philosophical/theological bent and allowed him to develop classes he loves to teach.

Fun fact: Zank has been singing since his teens and played drums and other instruments for almost as long. Nowadays his favorite instrument is the bass clarinet.