The Ultra-Orthodox Politicization of Judaism: Isaac Breuer’s Radicalization of Neo-Kantian Legal Philosophy

Itamar Ben Ami researches modernity, religion, state, and secularism in the twentieth century, and focuses in particular on the political theology of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At the Katz Center, he will examine how Haredism adopted halakhah to the statist era.

Ben Ami completed his PhD in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a dissertation titled “The Orthodoxy’s Discovery of the Political: Isaac Breuer and the Jewish Conservative Revolution,” which won the Pinchas and Sheindel Wald Doctoral Prize in Jewish History from the Zalman Shazar Center. He was previously a research fellow and lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University of Berlin.