... religion for the genocidal crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Creative Commons/Bracha L. Ettinger In marked contrast to New Atheist writers Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who blame religion for Hitler’s crimes, French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (above) saw Nazism as profoundly antireligious...

...Martin Jay Copyright © Tikkun magazine 2016 E mmanuel levinas has been known to serious students of European philosophy for sixty years, ever since the publication of his influential study of Edmund Husserl, the work Jean-Paul Sartre said had introduced him to phenomenology. Some of his...

... came from Jewish backgrounds. Two to emerge from horrors are Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) and the French philoso­ pher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995). Although they never met, each...

... in contemporary Jewish thought, the stakes are much higher. The dialogical principle for which Talmudic scholar and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (whom Debbie mentions admiringly) was heralded for decades actually unravels in political time, when, after the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982, Levinas himself...

...” of the years at least, makes any sense: two states [which Levinas midrashically shows West Bank at all, but that it has “liberated” for two peoples. The twenty-seven-nation helped save the Hebrews right the biblical Judea and Samaria, more European Union, to Israel’s predictable ire...

... Levinas argued for the importance of grounding philosophical speculation in the initial gesture of recognizing the Other—any other person—as being beyond our grasp. He described this recognition of an unknowable Other as a departure from the Western philosophical tradition’s approach to “knowing...

... with which Aryeh Cohen, and Emmanuel Levinas before him, have been engaged. Jews may have to struggle with these issues, such Christians would say, but we are not bound or compelled in any way in relation to our treatment of the Other. Really? Try telling that to Jesus, who left no daylight at all...

... between Levinas and rabbinic notions of obligation. What results is a picture of city life as one of constant care for the neighbor, of questioning one’s own level of service, and of a worship of God that reflects an unwavering obligation to His creation. I am jealous of this depiction of a justice-filled...

... sanctification of social reform and in its imaginative reinterpretation of religious tradition. He brings the insights of modernity to bear on the ancient concept of levaya (accompaniment), employing Levinas and Derrida to uncover/add layers of meanings. The city’s obligation to the literal stranger becomes...

... Levinas argued another woman. “This was going on behind that the basis of ethics is to regard others as m y back” she explains. not truly others—“the face is what one can­ The film concludes powerfully with not kill”—apremise that has been picked up England’s damning last testimony. Asked...

...), and that in disputed matters the majority should prevail. (This effectively eliminates God from all halachic discussions, save for citations in Torah verses. Later in this part of the Talmud, God laughs and declares, “My children have defeated me.”) Emmanuel Levinas observes that this elevation of Torah and Torah...

... influenced by religious existentialism and especially by Martin Buber’s view of religion as belonging to the interpersonal realm, where God too was to be addressed in essentially personal terms. A. J. Heschel, J. B. Soloveitchik, Emmanuel Levinas, and Eugene Borowitz, to name some key figures across...

... for God. Levinas said Western theism wrongly took God for being and that God should be conceived as the “other” of being. All repudiated the God of static being. Hegel and Schelling are important to me because they anticipated these critiques in the very process of epitomizing logocentric rationality...

..., to effect life’s further evolution without causing or countenancing involuntary suffering. Influenced variously by the Hasidic masters, Felix Adler, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas, and Abraham Joshua Heschel were among the pioneers of the line of Jewish, existential, “theo-humanistic” religious...

... and deep ethical connection that face-to-face contact arouses, as Emmanuel Levinas and Peter Gabel have taught us), these larger changes in the society and in our world are unlikely to be challenged in any serious way, even by those suffering the most. Powerlessness coupled with endlessly creative forms...

... policy in which, following Levinas, we love the other “because he is yourself.” It’s Rozensweig’s “speaking-listening.” It’s an adaptation of Martin Buber’s “we-we” relating. On occasion, I’ve asked American audiences to imagine a world that did not have America in it, so that taking...

... neighbor as yourself,” must be translated differently (in the tradition of Buber and Levinas): “Love your neighbor— he/she is yourself.” Bishop Desmond Tutu says the same idea is expressed in the African philosophy of ubuntu: “I live only when you live.” This, of course, has to be organized within...