My first project, Save and Be Saved: A Politics of Israel and/in the West, traces the political-ethical discourse that linked Israel and the United States from 1961-2025, how this discourse worked to subjectivate and prefigure each, and the role of these phenomena in foreclosing certain political possibilities while disseminating others, in Western political culture no less than in Israel and Palestine. Instead of examining the West’s postwar political ethics and Israeli politics independently, this project treats the two as a singular, transnational, object of study, linked by the trans-theological, Christian and Jewish prehistories of each. Analyzing key moments in the consolidation of these political ethics - from the Kastner and Eichmann trials, to American Jewry’s post-1967 embrace of Israel, to the 1990s Israeli-Palestinian peace process - this project probes the theological stakes of the West’s ethical commitment to the postwar survival of Jews, and its political alliance with the Israeli state.
My second project, tentatively titled Ex-Communication: A Political Theology of Boycotts, emerges from a discursive terrain mired in controversy about movements to boycott, “cancel,” and otherwise excise political targets who transgress ethical norms - especially the movement to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction Israel. My project turns to untapped theological resources, religious anthropology, as well as psychoanalytic and semiotic theory, to uncover the ontological assumptions and political commitments of politics-as-disengagement. By generating an intellectual framework emergent of boycotts’ prehistory, Ex-Communication challenges us to rethink the terms of inflamed political debates over (secularized) forms of (religious) excommunication that remain operative today.
Daniela Tolchinsky, Ph.D.
I am a political theorist specializing in political theology. My research deploys interdisciplinary methods to investigate the religious undercurrents of contemporary political ethics. I am particularly interested Jewish thought, the politics of Israel, and Israel’s relationship with the United States and with the West more broadly.