Piotr Sawczynski is Assistant Professor at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland, where he teaches philosophy and political studies. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Jewish thought, and especially on the messianic ideas of some 20th-century German-Jewish thinkers (Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others). He has published two books and almost twenty articles on various aspects of political messianism, and his most recent publications investigate the influence of Lurianic kabbalah on the political ontology of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Divinity School in the 2023-2024 academic year he will be working on the project titled “The Antinomies of Jewish Messianism: Leo Strauss – Gershom Scholem,” which is intended as a critical comparative analysis of the messianic ideas of Strauss and Scholem. It aims to expose the complex interlacement of their thought and demonstrate that, although the exoteric mutual references in the writings of Strauss and Scholem are scarce, they led an intense esoteric dialogue, continually challenging each other, even to the point of attempting a “strong misreading” of each other’s ideas to use them for their own purposes.