Kenneth Green

Kenneth Hart Green has been teaching in the DSR since 1987. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, he was introduced to Jewish philosophy by Emil Fackenheim. Green pursued graduate studies at Brandeis University and received his PhD in 1989 supervised by Marvin Fox.

Green’s major research interest has been the critical exploration of the thought of Leo Strauss, whom he regards as one of the most significant Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. Green has published several books on Leo Strauss:  Jew and Philosopher (SUNY Press, 1993); Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity (SUNY, 1997); Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings (U of Chicago Press, 2013); and Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (U of Chicago Press, 2013). He is also series editor for a SUNY Press series on “The Thought and Legacy of Leo Strauss,” in which so far 19 books have been published.

In recent years, Green published a major work on Emil Fackenheim’s thought, The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust. (Cambridge U Press, 2020.) He also edited, with Martin D. Yaffe, a collection of essays on the philosophy of Fackenheim: Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources (U of Toronto Press, 2021). In addition, Green has published articles on Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, Baruch/Benedict Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, S.Y. Agnon, Gershom Scholem, and Alexander Altmann. He is presently working on a new manuscript with the tentative title: “What Moses Saw: Maimonidean Meditations, or On the Torah as a Speculative Teaching.”