Hillel Fradkin

Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow and director of the Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World at Hudson Institute. He is founder and co-editor with Husain Haqqani and Eric Brown of the center's Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, the leading journal on contemporary Islamism (sometimes known as militant or radical Islam).

Dr. Fradkin is currently completing a book on the character and history of the dispute between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Its title is The Best of Communities Created for Man: The Contemporary Sunni Shiite Conflict in Historical Perspective. He is also often a director and participant in collaborative projects on the future dynamics of the order of the greater Middle East and the future dynamics of Islamism in Muslim politics done for the US Department of Defense. Recently, he has published articles on the Six Day War of June 1967 as well as the situation of the state of Israel in the presently evolving new world order. He will soon be undertaking a new book on the subject of nationalism and universalism as seen in the perspective of the Hebrew Bible.

Dr. Fradkin received his PhD in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago in 1978 for work done under the direction of the late Pakistani theologian Fazlur Rahman and was also a student of Dr. Muhsin Mahdi of Harvard University. His graduate studies included work on the history of Jewish thought. He received a BA in government from Cornell University.

Prior to joining Hudson in 2004, Dr. Fradkin was a fellow at several other research institutes. He was a member of the faculties of the University of Chicago (1986–98) and Columbia University/Barnard College (1979–86). He has taught at Yale University and Georgetown University. He was vice president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and director of its grant-making program in public policy research (1986-1998). He served in the US Army from 1969 to 1972 and was a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He writes on both classical and contemporary Islam as well as Middle Eastern politics, American foreign and security policy, and international relations, and has lectured widely both in the US and abroad, including in France, Great Britain, Germany, Morocco, Turkey, and Israel, before academic, public, and governmental audiences. In addition to work on Islamic history and thought, he has also written on the history of the problematic relationship of religion and politics as well as the history of Jewish thought.

His foreign languages include Hebrew, French, and Arabic.