Rachel R. Rosner

You have been studying Adorno for many years. How does your philosophical work connect with the questions of the Christosemitism Project?

I first came to Adorno through a very secular reading. But even then, I kept wondering why theological language and themes – such as redemption, messianic time, the sacred, and the divine ban on images – appear so often in his major works.

For a long time, that question was hard to ask seriously. In many academic settings, religion was still treated as something modern life was supposed to leave behind. Over time, that changed. Across the humanities and social theory, scholars began to see that religion had not disappeared, and that the old story of secular modernity replacing religion did not describe the world very well. That shift became the starting point for my own work. I began to ask what Adorno could offer once we stopped assuming that religion and secularity are fully separate. What I found was that he gives us real tools for thinking about how they are formed together and remain deeply entangled. For Adorno, modern reason does not simply free itself from religion and move on. It is shaped by broader histories and patterns that it might otherwise like to ignore. I think his own writing is designed to demonstrate this point.

This is where my work meets the Christosemitism Project. Karma’s research gave me a much broader historical frame for questions I was already pursuing. She shows with great clarity how forms of secularism are themselves shaped within a Christian history. Where Adorno helps us notice that modern rationality carries inherited structures of thought, the Christosemitism Project helps show more fully where those structures come from and how they continue to shape the present. The focus on antisemitism is especially important here, because it offers us a sharp lens through which to see how religious and secular strands remain bound together.

How has participating in the Christosemitism Project changed the way you approach your research?

It has been one of the most valuable parts of my recent work. Philosophy can become very self-contained. The Christosemitism Project has pushed me to think more historically and more carefully about how ideas move across theology, politics, literature, and public life. It has also made me more attentive to audience. These questions cannot stay inside one discipline, and they should not. It has also changed the kind of questions I ask. It is one thing to study concepts inside philosophy. It is another to see how those concepts travel into institutions, media, education, and public argument. That has made my work more grounded. The Christian background of modern secular thought is much harder for me to ignore now than it was before, and I think my research is stronger for it.

Your work introduces a new concept: postsecular antisemitism. What is it, and what does the persistent struggle to define antisemitism today tell us about the West?

By postsecular antisemitism, I mean a situation in which antisemitism is shaped by the boundary between religion and secularity, but often escapes notice because it does not fit neatly on either side. It is not simply a theological prejudice, and it is not only a secular pathology. It can appear in religious language, secular language, or in a mixture of both. I often put it this way. For most of the last century, the dominant view in social theory was that as modernity advances, secular life gradually replaces religion. This was called the secularization thesis. We have now broadly come to agree that this did not happen. Religion did not simply fade away. That is where the term postsecular comes from.

However, I think the term “postsecular” is often misread, and I prefer to say we are post-secularization thesis. That is a more accurate description. It does not mean we are somehow beyond religion or beyond the secular. It means we are beyond the old prediction. Religion and secularity have not dissolved into one another. We need better ways of understanding how they interact and how they continue to shape each other.

This matters directly for antisemitism. A lot of contemporary thinking still assumes, often before the argument even begins, that religion and secularity are separate domains. Once that assumption is in place, antisemitism can become hard to read, because it so often draws on both at once. That is one reason it does not always fit comfortably into the categories through which other forms of exclusion are analyzed. In this sense a good account of antisemitism has a lot to teach us in terms of broader theory, and in turn, better frameworks can really enrich our understanding of antisemitism.

As for what the persistent struggle to define antisemitism tells us: I think it shows that Western societies are still grappling with religious histories they do not fully know how to acknowledge. Universal moral language often stands alongside unresolved Christian inheritances. The repeated difficulty of naming antisemitism is one sign that these histories remain unsettled.

How do modern efforts to define and combat antisemitism intersect with the question of Christianity’s place in secular Europe? Are you unmasking a religious core that secularism claims to have outgrown?

I think Adorno and the Christosemitism Project have a great deal to offer current efforts to understand antisemitism. In my own work, I focus especially on frameworks that see themselves as secular and therefore as having little or nothing to do with religion. What Adorno helps us see is that no domain exists in isolation. In Western thought, we are dealing with a long and intertwined history, and Christianity is part of that history even where people imagine they have left it behind.

I would not describe this as “unmasking.” That word sounds too dramatic, and it suggests that the truth is simply hidden underneath the surface waiting to be revealed. The task is more patient than that. It is a matter of showing how ideas, language, beliefs, and practices that present themselves as secular can still be shaped by Christian inheritances. That isn’t meant as an accusation. It is part of understanding the history we are living in.

This matters for antisemitism because many contemporary efforts to identify it begin with categories that already sort phenomena into religious or secular boxes. But antisemitism often does not stay inside those boxes. It can move between them, combine them, and draw strength from both at once. Once you see that, the struggle to define antisemitism looks less like a technical dispute and more like a sign that our underlying frameworks are often too simple for the thing they are trying to grasp.

Is there such a thing as secularism? Are there “religious ghosts” still haunting modern secular institutions?

Yes, secularism is real. Modern secular institutions are real. I would not say they are simply religion in disguise. But I also do not think religion and secularism are two completely separate worlds that occasionally interact. I think they have been formed together over time. They shape one another. I tend to avoid language that suggests there is some hidden core buried underneath the surface, waiting to be uncovered. I do not think history works that way. What we call “religion” and what we call “the secular” develop in relation to one another, and together they produce the world we now inhabit.

So when people speak of religious ghosts, I understand the point, but I would put it differently. Many ideas, institutions, and practices that present themselves as secular carry the marks of Christian histories. This is not only true in Europe. It matters in the United States and in societies shaped by Western colonial histories too. The point is not that secularism is false. The point is that it does not exist in a self-contained bubble. It has a history, which continues to matter, and it is bound up with non-secular domains in such a way that it would be wrong to say the two can be wholly separated.

Is a genuine correction — a tikun — possible through Adorno’s lens, or are we destined to remain trapped in a cycle where antisemitism simply mutates to serve whoever holds power?

What I find valuable in Adorno is that he does not treat antisemitism as one fixed thing that simply reappears unchanged across history. He sees it as a socially available pattern that can take many forms. It can be shaped by psychology, politics, economics, theology, culture, and by the wider pressures of modern life. This is why it mutates. But mutation does not mean pure repetition. It means that certain patterns remain available and can be taken up in new circumstances. So I would resist the idea that we are simply trapped in an endless cycle. Adorno is too dark a thinker to promise easy redemption, but he is not a thinker of total fatalism either. He holds on to the idea that life could be better, that social conditions could be less cruel, that people could be less damaged by the worlds they inherit. He does not hand us a clear map for how to get there. But the refusal to accept things as they are is itself something.

For me, that tension is really important and matters a great deal. We need enough realism to see how persistent and adaptable antisemitism can be. But we also need enough hope to think that naming those patterns more clearly can help weaken them. If there is a tikun here, it begins with learning to see more accurately what we are actually dealing with.

Rachel R. Rosner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Christosemitism ERC Project and a Knapp Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).