Menachem Lorberbaum

Menachem Lorberbaum is Professor of Jewish Philosophy and former Vice-Dean of Appointments in the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University. He chaired the Graduate School of Philosophy and the Department of Jewish Philosophy at TAU (2004) and was the founding chair of the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies (2004-2008). A founding member of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, Prof. Lorberbaum headed its Bet Midrash program.

Lorberbaum completed his PhD at the Hebrew University and spent three years at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was also Ellie and Herbert D. Katz Distinguished Fellow and Erika A. Strauss Teaching Fellow, 2017 at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania and is invited to Stanford University shortly as David S. Lobel Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies and Teaching Fellow, 2026. He has been a regular visiting Professor at the Pontifical University Thomas Aquinas, ‘Angelicum’, Rome.

Prof. Lorberbaum has published a study of Hassidism as a model of Jewish religious revitalization in early modernity, Before Hassidism (Bialik Institute 2022). His work in first-order Jewish Theology, I Seek thy Countenance was published by Carmel, Bar-Ilan and the Hartman Institute (2021). He is author of Politics and the Limits of Law (Stanford 2001; Hebrew: 2006) and We are Dazzled by His Beauty (Hebrew, Ben Zvi Institute 2011). Together with Professors Michael Walzer of Princeton and Noam Zohar of Bar-Ilan he is a senior editor of the Jewish Political Tradition series (vol 1 "Authority," Yale University Press 2000, Hebrew: 2007; vol. 2 "Membership," Yale University Press 2003, Hebrew: 2018; vol. 3 "Community," Yale University Press 2018). He is editor of the new and first complete Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (Shalem 2009). A Hebrew collection of papers in political philosophy, Leviathan in the Holy Land, has been accepted for publication by Yediot Aharonot publishers. His collection of essays in political theology On Thinking God (forthcoming) has been the focus of a conference on his work by The Center for Intellectual Diaspora and the Katolische Akadamie, Berlin. Prof. Lorberbaum has also published three volumes of Hebrew verse and together with Prof. Michal Govrin, edited the Devarim poetry series of Carmel publishers that published his book of translations of English poetry Transpositions.

Lorberbaum's scholarship focuses on the formation of political and theological discourse and their interaction. As a Jewish Studies Teaching Fellow, Lorberbaum will teach the course, "That Mortal God: Deifying the Political in Early Modern Politics" for the Department of Philosophy.