Gilah Kletenik

2024-2026 Hazel D. Cole Fellow in Jewish Studies
Stroum Center Affiliate Faculty

Ph.D. New York University

Contact Information:
Email: gilah@uw.edu
Office Hours: By appointment

Faculty Profile

Gilah Kletenik is a scholar of philosophy, specializing in Jewish philosophy from the medieval through modern periods. Her present research centers on Spinoza’s philosophy, which she studies within the context of his medieval influences like Maimonides and Gersonides, alongside his contemporaries such as René Descartes and Anne Conway, and his many heirs, including, Karl Marx and Gilles Deleuze. Currently, Kletenik is in the final stages of preparing her first book, Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality.

Previously, Kletenik was Postdoctoral Associate at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. Before that, she was Alan M. Stroock Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Kletenik received her Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University in 2020. She holds an M.A. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and an M.A. in Bible and Talmud.

Kletenik’s research traces how power and hierarchy sponsor dominant “Western” ideas about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and what it means to be human. Against this pervasive reliance on sovereignty, Kletenik uncovers a radical alternative in the naturalism and immanence advanced by medieval, early modern, and modern Jewish thought, especially as manifest in Spinoza’s philosophy. Her work is in conversation with critical theory, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, affect theory, and queer theory.