Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent, 6.2.20
ערב דיון לכבוד ספרו של פול מנדס-פלור
פרופ׳ פול מנדס-פלור, האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים
Paul Mendes-Flohr offers an authoritative view of the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965). The book is organized around several key moments, such as Buber’s sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three. This foundational trauma, as Mendes-Flohr shows, left an enduring mark on Buber’s inner life, attuning him to the fragility of human relations and the need to nurture them with what he would call a “dialogical attentiveness.”
Buber’s philosophical and theological writings, most famously I and Thou, made significant contributions to religious and Jewish thought, philosophical anthropology, biblical studies, political theory, and Zionism. In this accessible new biography, Mendes-Flohr situates Buber’s life and legacy in the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry as well as in the broader European intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century.