Biography

Evan Goldstein is a scholar of religion and modernity, with a focus on Judaism. His research asks how the political, economic, and social crises of Western modernity shape depictions of Jews and Judaism in literature, film, and television. He is especially interested in how the cultural politics of Jewish modernity and its study are shaped by experiences and figures of loss. He is currently completing a book entitled Afterlives: Jewish Melancholia and the Aesthetics of the Secular, which demonstrates the centrality of loss, mourning, and haunting in twentieth-century Jewish culture and politics. Through close readings of aesthetic and philosophical works by authors including Marcel Proust, Anna Margolin, Cynthia Ozick, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, Afterlives traces the forms and force of loss in modern Jewish life. His research has appeared in academic and popular venues including Religion & American Culture, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Parapraxis, and Mid-Theory Collective, and he is currently working on a study of sacramental form in Djuan Barnes’ Nightwood (the greatest novel ever written). In addition to his teaching in Religious Studies, he is an active member of the Center for Social Theory and the Associate Chair of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies.

Selected Publications

• “Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of the Secular,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming).
• “‘Wonderful Silence’: Anna Margolin and the Afterlives of Yiddish Modernism,” Comparative Literature (forthcoming, 2026).
• “Jewish-American Literature in the Ruins of the University,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (forthcoming, 2026).
• “Busy Griefs,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (forthcoming, 2026; a response to the responses to “Jewish-American Literature in the Ruins of the University”)
• “The Prayers and Tears of Dr. Robby,” Mid-Theory Collective, May 7, 2026
• “Freud’s Jewish Closet,” Parapraxis Magazine, September 16, 2024
• “Lectures to Specters: Ozick’s Genealogies,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, vol. 40, no. 3 (2024), 140-174.