My major areas of interest are Jewish thought, the reception-history of biblical symbols, and the interplay between scripture and politics.
In the area of Jewish thought, I cut my mental teeth on German Jewish intellectuals and Continental philosophers Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Martin Buber (1873-1965), Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), and Leo Strauss (1899-1973). For an overview of my work in this area see Jüdische Religionsphilosophie als Apologie des Mosaismus (Tübingen, 2016).
As to the reception-history of biblical symbols, I wrote a brief history of Jerusalem, published by Wiley-Blackwell. In this book, I attempt to answer the question how an ordinary royal city of the ancient southern Levant became the holy city of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and what the city means to them today.
An essay on the Torah as a literary genre and its afterlives in Christian and modern Jewish political theology appeared in Speight and Zank, Politics, Religion and Political Theology (Amsterdam 2017).
More recent publications.
For free samples of my work see https://bu.academia.edu/MichaelZank.
An updated resumé is also posted at http://www.bu.edu/religion/faculty/bios/zank/.
