Ben Sax serves as the Head of Scholarship and the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. Ben is an experienced professor, university administrator, scholar, award-winning teacher, public speaker, and practitioner and facilitator of interreligious dialogue. Before arriving at the ICJS, Ben was director of the Malcolm and Diane Rosenberg Program in Judaic Studies and the founding faculty principal at the West Ambler Johnston Residential College at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. In addition to publishing on topics relating to Jewish philosophy, German-Jewish history and culture, Jewish-Christian relations, and interreligious dialogue, Ben has discussed his work on PBS and Baltimore’s NPR affiliate WYPR. He has been invited to lecture all around the world including Oxford, Rome, Heidelberg, Jerusalem and beyond, and, has been a speaker in United States State Department’s Speaker Program, most recently at the US Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was interviewed for Martin Dobblemeier’s film Spiritual Audacity: The Abraham Joshua Heschel Story and served as a consultant for his film The Sabbath.
Ben currently serves as the co-chair for the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies Unit for the American Academy of Religion (AAR); on the steering committee for the Interreligious and Interfaith Studies Program Unit for the American Academy of Religion (AAR); and on the advisory council for the Association for Interreligious/Interfaith Studies (AIIS)
Ben’s book, Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation, was published in July, 2023 (Brill). He is currently at work on a book about antisemitism.
Ben holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (B.A., Social Thought and Political Economy), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (M.A., Jewish Thought), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., History of Judaism). He also studied at Middlebury College’s Summer Language School, where he received a Zertifikat ÖSD Mittelstufe, M.D. in German Language and Culture. For access to Ben’s publications, please visit his Academia.edu webpage.
