 Her pioneering essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Franz Kafka helped establish Susman as a leading thinker of modern Jewish thought. Often her work assumes the form of studies of other thinkers or intellectual or social movements. These studies are not merely exegetical and interpretative, however, but articulate Susman’s own response to the question of how to deal with the historical constellations of past philosophical thought in the face of the unprecedented exigencies of the present. In them, Susman stakes out a dialogical space for her own critical concerns. She does so by maintaining a reflective receptivity whose explorative openness opposes the tendency to closure informing the style of academic, disciplinary discourse.