Shira Billet

Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics

Phone: (212) 870-5856

Building Room: Kripke 603

Office Hours: By Appointment

Shira Billet is assistant professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics at JTS, academic director of JTS’s Hendel Center for Ethics and Justice, and the BA and MA advisor for the Jewish Ethics program at JTS. Before joining the JTS faculty, she was a postdoctoral associate in Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Yale University, after completing her PhD in the Religion and Philosophy (Religion, Ethics, and Politics) subfield in the Department of Religion at Princeton University.

Dr. Billet’s research focuses on Jewish philosophy and Jewish thought, especially in 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Europe. She studies Jewish philosophy in its historical contexts — including the history of philosophy and the history of Jewish studies scholarship — and in relation to contemporary conversations in Jewish thought, philosophy (especially ethics and epistemology), and religious studies. She is currently completing her first book, entitled The Philosopher as Witness: Hermann Cohen on the Virtues and the History of Philosophy.

Recent publications include:

“From Volozhin to London: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Jewish-Christian Holy Spirit” (Journal of Textual Reasoning, 2025)

“Harry S. Truman’s Bible and Earl Warren’s Talmud: A Forgotten Story in the Encounter between American Law and Jewish Studies” (Diné Israel, 2024)

 “‘Let the Historian be a Philosopher!’: Hermann Cohen’s Methodological Dispute with Spinoza” (Spinoza in Germany: Political and Religious Thought across the Long Nineteenth Century; Oxford University Press, 2024)

“‘Do Not Grieve Excessively’: Rabbis Mourning Children Between Law and Narrative in The Rabbinic Laws of Mourning and Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man” (Journal of Textual Reasoning, 2023)

“Hermann Cohen’s Virtue Ethics” (Jewish Virtue Ethics; SUNY Press, 2023)

“Between Jewish Law and State Law: Rethinking Hermann Cohen’s Critique of Spinoza” (Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2018).

Listen to Dr. Billet’s discussion of Hermann Cohen with the Podcast of Jewish Ideas