About CBCM

The Center for the Study of Bible, Culture, and Modernity (CBCM) is a collaborative project of the University of Antwerp, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Princeton University whose goal is to advance innovative and critical scholarship on modern biblical reception. CBCM has held a series of conferences and workshops since 2012 in Antwerp, Jerusalem, and Princeton, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries.

The CBCM aims at expanding perception of what constitutes biblical reception in drawing attention to the contribution of literature, art, music, philosophy, film, television, and digital media in determining the pivotal roles of the Bible in modern contexts.

While focusing on modernity, the CBCM welcomes consideration of the impact of earlier interpretive trends on modern hermeneutic projects. In recent years, the CBCM has devoted special attention to the political and ethical dimensions of biblical reception.

Leora Batnitzky is Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor and Chair of Religion at Princeton University.  She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011), as well as the co-editor of The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (De Gruyter, 2014), Jewish Legal Theories (Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, 2018) and Institutionalizing Rights and Religion (Cambridge, 2017). Her current book project is a comparative study of legal cases concerning religious conversion in Israel and India.

Vivian Liska is Professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013, she is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her recent books include Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus (Wien: Schlebrügge Editor, 2008), When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), and German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). She is the editor of the book series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts (Berlin: De Gruyter).

Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of the Center for Literary Studies. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008), Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), and The Song of Songs: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton University Press, 2019). She is currently working on the reception of  the Book of Ruth.