Jared Cohen

The locus of my research is humanist Utopia and Jewish messianism, particularly in the Germanosphere of the early twentieth century. I explore the liberatory and egalitarian tendencies in both secular and religious thought that arose through and in response to the transformations undergone by the humanist tradition in the modernist era. While at the same time as nationalism and ethnic chauvinism grew in strength throughout the region, parts of Central Europe also saw the expansion of individual freedom, human rights, and cosmopolitanism in a period of intensified socialist hopes. My research focuses on the Jewish-German thinkers, assimilated yet distinct, whose revolutionary ideas land in the broader Left response to the seismic shifts in European culture and political economy. Living at the confluence of what Michael Löwy calls romantic anti-capitalism and an increasingly ambiguous religious heritage, these thinkers belonged to a unique world that came into being with imperially decreed emancipation and flourished in the interwar democratic experiment before facing utter destruction in the Shoah and disappointment under Soviet Realsozialismus.

I am deeply interested in the poetry of Paul Celan and have variously written on the affinities between his work and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, and Ernst Bloch. I have analyzed Utopia, dialogue, and commemoration as they are approached in Celan’s poetry as his response to the experience of disappointment and disaster. Other important writers to my research include Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Gershom Scholem. I am interested in modernist literature and poetry more broadly, as well as literary and philosophical treatments of revolution in socialist and religious contexts.