Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago/Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Paul Mendes-Flohr's major research interests include modern Jewish intellectual history, modern Jewish philosophy and religious thought, philosophy of religion, German intellectual history, and the history and sociology of intellectuals. Together with Peter Schäfer, he serves as editor in chief of the twenty-two-volume German edition of the collected works of Martin Buber, sponsored by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has recently written Jüdische Identität. Die zwei Seele der deutschen Juden, and is currently completing a biography of Franz Rosenzweig, as well as two additional books: Franz Rosenzweig and the Possibility of a Jewish Theology and Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures). He is the editor of a series on German-Jewish literature for the University of Wisconsin Press, five volumes of which are currently in press.

Dialogue and the Politics of Reconciliation: A Case of Israelis and Palestinians.

The concept of dialogue beckons us to confirm - to say Yes - to the existential reality of our fellow human beings; to say Yes to the presence of the Other whose being is irreducible to any particular feature or set of attributes by which he or she may be perceived. To relate to another only according to certain perceived or highlighted attributes is to distort the full and untimely unique reality of the other. In the short hand of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who developed these insights in what may be called a philosophy of dialogue, when we meet the Other in this fashion we invite the Other to respond in kind and to confirm our own existential reality. For Buber, the dialogical encounter also had a religious dimension. In responding to the Other dialogically, we also meet G-d.

Our principal text will be Buber's poetic meditation I and Thou. When we turn to the application of the philosophy of dialogue, our main text will be a collection of Buber's essays on the Arab-Israeli conflict, A Land of Two Peoples. At the conclusion of our third meeting, all registered participants are to submit a short paper, no more than ten pages, reflecting critically on Buber's philosophy of dialogue.