Mendel Kranz is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Antisemitism Studies at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he served as the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University’s Program in Jewish Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2023.
Kranz’s research examines the intersections of modern Jewish thought, postcolonial studies, and the entangled histories of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racialization. His first book, The Postcolonial Jewish Question: Colonialism, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia in Postwar France (under review), explores how Jewish intellectual life in France was transformed by decolonization and its aftermath from the 1950s through the turn of the century. He is currently editing a volume on the history and politics of anti-anti-Semitism from the postwar period to the present.
His scholarship has appeared in Levinas Studies, Hebrew Studies, and The Journal of Religion, as well as in edited collections including Jewish Ideas of France: Migration, Diaspora, and Empire (Routledge). An award-winning teacher, Kranz teaches courses on Jewish history, race and religion, antisemitism and Islamophobia, and Jews in colonial and postcolonial contexts.