Hammerschlag Receives Accolades from AJS
The Association for Jewish Studies recently announced its 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award recipients. Sarah Hammerschlag (MA 2001, PhD 2006), who will join the faculty of the Divinity School on July 1, 2013 as Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature, received an Honorable Mention in Philosophy and Jewish Thought for her book The Figural Jew: Politics & Identity in Postwar French Thought (The University of Chicago Press, 2010). The book explores the figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, and reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.
