Tolerance and Intolerance in Israel / Palestine: Religion, Plurality, and Difference
Symposium in Memory of Roi Benbassat
November 12, 2020, 2-6pm
Organized by Christian Wiese (Goethe-University Frankfurt) and Karma Ben Johanan (Humboldt University Berlin)
This symposium is dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague Dr. Roi Benbassat, who tragically passed away after a long illness in November 2019. We remember him as a fine philosopher and astute thinker, who earned his PhD in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University in 2011, where he has also been teaching Socratic-Platonic Philosophy, Kant’s ethical and religious philosophy and Kierkegaard’s thought. His dissertation was entitled: “The Relation between the Philosophical and the Religious: Reconsidering Kierkegaard’s Confrontation with Philosophy”. Since 2013, during a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Comparative Ethics at Freie Universität Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Maimonides Centre for Jewish Scepticism at the University of Hamburg, his research expended into Jewish studies and focused on the work of the Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
Since 2017, Roi Benbassat was a research fellow at the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt and an essential member of the interdisciplinary team of scholars working on questions regarding religious diversity, difference and dialogism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (“Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Contexts”; www.relpos.de). His most recent research focused on phenomena of tolerance and intolerance in inner-Jewish debates in the 20th century, particularly within Israeli society. The symposium will be devoted to difference aspects of this topic.
The symposium will take place online via Zoom. Please register via email (N.Fischer@em.uni-frankfurt.de) in order to be sent the Zoom details. The event will also be recorded and can later be watched via the YouTube Channel of the Martin Buber Professur für Jüdische Religionsphilosophie https://youtube.com/channel/UC3nXa7GsCUKLklTuMI5S-oA)