Writing

Articles and Chapters

The Politics of the Arab-Jew: Colonial Memory, Immigration, and Postcolonial Futures in North African Jewish Writing of the 1980s

Jewish Ideas of France: Migration, Diaspora, and Empire, ed. Meredith Scott and Nick Underwood, Routledge University Press (2025)

Explores debates around the Arab-Jew in France in the 1980s, arguing that they were responding to and shaping the broader postcolonial landscape and Jews place within it. Reframes our understanding of the “Arab-Jew” and its function in France. By foregrounding this colonial frame, it sheds light on the complex ways Jews are imbricated within the broader fabric of French postcolonial politics.

[Review]: Julie Kalman, The King of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond

The Journal of Religion (2025)

Review of Kalman’s book that highlights its interests for scholars in Religious Studies as well as for Jews in the Muslim World

Preface and Translation of Emmanuel Levinas’s “We Need a Culture”

Levinas Studies 14 (2020) 1-18

A newly translated essay by Levinas concerning Jewish culture and its relation to Zionism. The preface locates the colonial backdrop of Levinas’s postwar project for Judaism and his relation to Zionism.

Postcolonial Zionism: Theological-Political Paradigms in Levinas and Memmi

Hebrew Studies 60 (2019) 293-321

A critical comparison of Albert Memmi and Emmanuel Levinas that situates them in a distinctly postcolonial context and sheds light on their repsective political and theological renderings of Jewishness and Zionism.

The Problem with Freedom from Religion: Laïcité Must Reckon with the Continuing Impact of French Colonial History

Sightings (2021)

Argues that, under the guise of protecting laïcité, France’s current political and intellectual campaign against “Islamo-leftism” represents a failure to reckon with its colonial history and perpetuates Islamophobic policies that regulate religious expression while ignoring deep-rooted racial and imperial legacies.

[Review]: Adi Gordon, Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn

George L. Mosse Program in History (2020)

Review of Gordon’s book that pushes us to think more about Kohn’s legacies.

Podcast interview with Cynthia Baker on Jew (Rutgers)

New Books Network (2018)

Interview with Cynthia Baker and Mattew Johnson for the New Books Network.

[Edited Volume]: Rethinking Anti-Antisemitism and Philosemitism

[Article]: The Politics of Recognition: Notes on Jewish and Indigenous Studies

[Aritlce]: Léon Poliakov and the Racial Afterlives of Jewish Thought