Sarah B. K. Greenberg

Sarah B. K. Greenberg is a Lecturer in Social Studies. Sarah held a 2022-2023 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship for her scholarship on Jewish political thought. Sarah’s research seeks to carve out space for Jewish thought and thinkers — particularly the theological sources that have been sidelined or excluded – as Judaism occupies an often-marginal, not-quite-assimilated space in ‘Western’ political thought. Sarah’s first book project, “The Law is Not in Heaven”: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought, argues that Jewish conceptions of covenant provide resources for rethinking hegemonic conceptions of authority in the Western political tradition. Through a study of the works of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, all in dialogue with the Jewish textual canon, Sarah’s dissertation explores covenant as both a foundation for authority and a foundation for disobedience and dissent, and, thus, as an alternative to dominant understandings of both religious and political authority via a model of command and obedience. 

Prior to graduate school, Sarah worked as a policy advocate in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in church-state law. Sarah received her B.A. magna cum laude in Government and French from Cornell University in 2013. And, in 2024, Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Government (Political Thought) from Cornell.