Shabbat Zachor, February 27

Our next minyan will be held on Shabbat Zachor, February 27, at 9 AM at the Hostel.

Dr. Paul Frank will talk about “Torah In the Age of Empire: Lessons From Purim and Chanukah”.

Dr. Paul Franks was appointed the inaugural holder of the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 2008. He lives in Thornhill, Ontario, with his wife, Hindy Najman, and their children, Marianna (10) and Ezra (8).

After learning at Gateshead Yeshiva, Paul was awarded the Brackenbury Scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford in 1983. He then moved to Harvard, where he earned his PhD in philosophy in 1993. After a Junior Fellowship at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Paul taught at Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago, before moving to the University of Toronto in 2004.

Paul has been a Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University, a Whiting Humanities Fellow at Harvard, and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. This year, he is a Fellow at the Jackman Institute for the Humanities at the University of Toronto.

Paul specializes in the German-Jewish tradition from Mendelssohn to Rosenzweig and beyond, and he is also interested in the Lithuanian tradition of Jewish thought stemming from the Vilna Gaon.

He has published widely in the areas of Kantian and post-Kantian metaphysics and epistemology, and Jewish philosophy. He has been Associate Editor of the International Yearbook of German Idealism since its inception in 2003. In addition to many articles, he has published two books: Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Hackett Publishing, 2000); and All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Harvard University Press, 2005). He is currently working on an introduction to modern Jewish philosophy, to be published by Cambridge University Press, and a monograph on Kant’s legacy in metaphysics and epistemology, to be published by Oxford University Press.