After receiving his PhD from Stanford University in 2011 he was a research fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His first book, an intellectual biography of the renowned Jewish German and Israeli scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, was published in 2017 by University of Chicago Press. Much of his work focuses on the interface between the German and Jewish cultures, as well as the creation of “new worlds” in the German-speaking cultural realm. He also studies German culture of the postwar era.