Professor of Religion, Jewish, and Medieval Studies
Michael Zank (b. 1958), a native of Germany, studied Protestant Theology, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies in Göttingen, Kiel, Heidelberg, and Jerusalem before he received a PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University in Waltham/Mass with a dissertation on Reconciling Judaism and Cultural Consciousness: The Idea of Versöhnung in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Religion, 1994. He has since written books and articles on German-Jewish philosophical and political thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, on Jerusalem in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious and political imagination, and on topics in philosophy of religion.
At BU, he served as director of undergraduate and graduate studies in Religion, as well as director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies (2011-12, 2013-2022). He currently directs the Institute for Philosophy of Religion.
A passionate and prize-winning teacher, Zank’s current classes include RN101 The Bible, RN106 Death and Immortality, RN220 Holy City: Jerusalem in Time Space and the Imagination, RN396 Philosophy of Religion, and RN420 Maimonides.
Fun facts: Zank is a recorded singer and multi-instrumentalist (including drums and bass-clarinet) and he regularly bakes sourdough bread. (Samples available on request.) His favorite thing in the world is to travel with his wife, the artist Miriam Shenitzer, and to make new friends.
For more on Zank see http://blogs.bu.edu/mzank.
For a musical sample, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNpbAh6vIIo
- Michael Zank, Drums
Books
Jerusalem: A Brief History
By Michael Zank
September 2018, Wiley-Blackwell
By now at Wiley!
Politics, Religion and Political Theology
Editors: Allen Speight, Michael Zank
Springer Netherlands, July 2017
Take a Teacher, Make a Friend
Edited by Michael Zank and Leanne Hoppe
2014
The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience
Edited by Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson
Brill, May 2015
Jüdische Religionsphilosophie als Apologie des Mosaismus
By Michael Zank
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Company K, 2016
New Perspectives on Martin Buber
(Editor and Contributor)
[Religion in Philosophy and Theology, ed. Ingo Dalferth, vol. 22] Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006.
The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen
By Michael Zank
