THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY
JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM
cordially invites you to a lecture by
Brian Klug
Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy
St. Benet's Hall
Placing Time:
The Concept of Diaspora in a Jewish Context
In the course of a conversation with Amos Oz (published in Ha’aretz, January 2003), the Israeli writer David Grossman posed the following question: “Are we a people of place or of time?” The question is ambiguous in each of its parts and as a whole, yet it is pregnant with meaning. Starting out in the direction that Grossman indicates in the conversation, I shall try to think the question through, disentangling the issues it raises. In the process, I shall distinguish between three different concepts of a Jewish Diaspora that, in different ways, are defined in relation to Zion. One is geopolitical. A second is ideological. The third is integral to the structure of the Jewish moral universe: while it is oriented to Zion, a place, it is constituted by time. I shall try to retrieve the third concept, giving time its place in the Jewish scheme of things. Finally, I shall comment, in the light of recent events, on the dangers of confusing these three concepts with each other.
Tuesday, February 10 at 6 p.m.
In Gellner Room, Monument Building
Dr Brian Klug is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford; member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford; Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, Saint Xavier University, Chicago; and Hon Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. He also teaches for the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford. In 2012 he was Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia, Adelaide, where he taught a seminar on ‘Wittgenstein on Culture and Religion’, with multi-faith participation. Among the subjects he has taught at Oxford are tutorial courses on ‘Philosophy after Auschwitz: Ethics and Modernity in the Light of the Nazi Holocaust’ and ‘Zion and Zionism: Conceptions of Jewish Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. As Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Southampton, he taught a seminar course on the British mandate period in Palestine. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and has published extensively on Jewish identity, antisemitism and racism. His most recent books are Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (Vallentine Mitchell , 2011) and Offence: The Jewish Case (Seagull Press, 2009).
A reception will follow
