Israeli philosopher. Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His books include Kant’s Critique of Spinoza (Oxford University Press, 2014), Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel (Penguin Random House, 2021), and Radikaler Universalismus: Jenseits von Identität (Propyläen Verlag, 2023). He is the winner of the 2024 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.
Provocative far-right calls for Germany to ‘move on’ from historical guilt miss the point: politics of memory and its practices may transition from contrition to responsible forgetting, but there is no end date to remembering that should accommodate diverse members of society.
Europe has learnt the need to protect human dignity as inviolable, refuting the myth of national sovereignty and ethnically-based citizenship. But it also embraces these principles as forms of emancipation for Jews and previously colonized nations. This inconsistency endangers both Europe and its past victims.
It has become axiomatic in our distrustful age that truth stands in tension with friendship. But the traps of identitarianism require that we rehabilitate our relation to truth – and understand it not as the opposite of friendship, but its very condition.
The Left in Israel has been decimated. Some believe that the only chance for meaningful opposition is for the Left to drop the doctrine that Zionism requires a Jewish State. The Zionist Left, so this argument goes, should abandon the two-state solution in favour of a federal arrangement with Palestine. A discussion.
